Slant-Stack Migration Applied to Plane-Wave Ultrasound Imaging.

Abstract

Ultrafast plane-wave ultrasound imaging replaces numerous focused-beam transmissions with a single emitted plane-wave pulse, insonifying the entire subsurface region of interest all at once. To improve image quality, one can employ coherent plane wave compounding (CPWC), whereby several pulses are emitted sequentially at different steering angles, and their corresponding acquired raw data frames are individually beamformed and then combined to form a final reconstructed image frame. We describe a classic geophysical reconstruction technique called slant-stack migration, adapted here to CPWC imaging. Our evaluation results, based on two public-domain datasets featuring both anechoic and hyperechoic targets, demonstrate that the presented approach compares favorably with conventional delay-and-sum beamforming.