Rapid refocusing of ultrasound images in frequency domain using range-Doppler algorithm

Abstract

The ability to maintain image uniformity and high resolution over large depths is important for several clinical applications of ultrasound, including deep abdominal imaging in patients with high BMI. One way to improve image quality in such cases is to use retrospective transmit focusing, which involves combining received data from different focused transmits to improve image resolution and SNR outside of transmit focal zone. Retrospective transmit is typically accomplished using the delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming, which can be slow on systems without a GPU. As a faster alternative, we treat beamsummed signals from focused transmits as monostatic synthetic aperture data from virtual sources, and apply a frequency-domain beamformer such as RDA to rapidly refocus an RF image. We demonstrate the concept using FIELD II simulated ultrasound signals from a point target phantom over 200 mm depth. The RDA-refocused image shows a uniform point spread function, and the reduction in full-width at half maximum by a factor of 2.5 compared to the original image from focused transmits at f-number 10. RDA-based refocusing also achieves a speedup by a factor of 14 relative to the DAS-based retrospective beamformer.