High-Frame Rate 3D-Synthetic Transmit Aperture Imaging with a Reduced Number of Measurement Channels

Abstract

This paper presents a high-frame rate, 3D synthetic transmit aperture system combined with a micro-beamforming technique to reduce the number of measurement channels $M$ (the product of number of transmissions, $n_{T}$ , and the number of receiving channels in each transmission, $n_{R}$ ). Adjacent elements were combined along both the lateral and the elevational direction into groups by applying proper delays in transmission and receiving to focus the beams at a specific region of interest. After the $M$ channels of RF data were acquired, the frequency-domain spatial response function was used to reconstruct the ultrasound images. We have demonstrated that using this approach with a 9-fold reduction in transmission events and 49-fold reduction in receiving channels can achieve the comparable image quality with standard synthetic transmit aperture using a full array. The approach may help in realizing clinical applications of real-time 3D ultrasound imaging technology using large arrays