Synthetic aperture sequential beamforming using spatial matched filtering

Abstract

Synthetic Aperture Sequential Beamforming (SASB) has shown to achieve a good resolution and high penetration depth. The low complexity at the transducer level of the beam-former makes it ideal for use with a handheld device. SASB with a low F# (≤ 0.5) can achieve even better resolution at the cost of high grating lobes, which causes loss of contrast in the final image. In this paper, Spatial Matched Filtering (SMF) was used instead the second stage of beamformer, in an attempt to suppress the grating lobes. The advantage of SMF over SASB was investigated by pushing the limits of F#, from 1.5 to 0.5. The effect of the number of emissions used in first stage was also investigated. A 3.3 MHz BK Ultrasound 9040 convex array was simulated in Field II on a point scatter phantom and a cyst phantom. The resolution was quantified with the full-width-half-max (FWHM), and the contrast was measured with the 20 dB cystic resolution. The contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) was calculated for the cyst mimicking phantom. The results showed that SMF achieved similar resolution as SASB and improved grating lobe suppression leading to an increase in contrast. The grating lobes caused by an F# of 0.5 are dominant in the SASB images, but not as much in SMF images. The CNR for a cyst mimicking phantom was improved 7 dB and 6 dB for SMF over SASB at depth 20 mm and 30 mm, with an F# of 0.5 and 256 emissions. The FWHM for SMF was slightly higher than SASB across all depth and parameter settings, with a maximum difference of 0.3 mm. It was demonstrated that SMF can achieve similar resolution to SASB and for certain parameter settings improve the contrast by suppressing the grating lobe artifacts.