Diverging Wave Research Articles

Row Transmission for High Volume-Rate Ultrasound Imaging With a Matrix Array.

The widely used Vermon 1024-element matrix array for 3-D ultrasound imaging has three blank rows in the elevational direction, which breaks the elevation periodicity, thus degrading volumetric image quality. To bypass the blank rows in elevation while maintaining the steering capability in azimuth, we proposed a row-transmission (RT) scheme to improve 3-D spatial resolution. Specifically, we divided the full array into four apertures, each with multiple rows along the elevation. Each multirow aperture (MRA) was further divided into subapertures to transmit diverging waves (DWs) sequentially. Coherent DW compounding (CDWC) was realized in azimuth, while the elevation was multielement synthetic aperture (M-SA) imaging by regarding each row as an array of dashed line elements. An in-house spatiotemporal coding strategy, cascaded synthetic aperture (CaSA), was incorporated into the RT scheme as RT-CaSA to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We compared the proposed RT with conventional bank-by-bank transmission-reception (Bank) and sparse-random-aperture compounding (SRAC) in a wire phantom and the in vivo human abdominal aorta (AA) to assess the performance of anatomical imaging and aortic wall motion estimation. Phantom results demonstrated superior lateral resolution achieved by our RT scheme (+19.52% and +16.88% versus Bank, +15.32% and +19.72% versus SRAC, in the azimuth-depth and elevation-depth planes, respectively). Our RT-CaSA showed excellent contrast ratios (CRs) (+8.19 and +8.08 dB versus Bank, +6.81 and +5.85 dB versus SRAC, +0.99 and +0.90 dB versus RT) and the highest in vivo aortic wall motion estimation accuracy. The RT scheme was demonstrated to have potential for various matrix array-based 3-D imaging research.

Ultrafast Cardiac Imaging Using Deep Learning for Speckle-Tracking Echocardiography.

High-quality ultrafast ultrasound imaging is based on coherent compounding from multiple transmissions of plane waves (PW) or diverging waves (DW). However, compounding results in reduced frame rate, as well as destructive interferences from high-velocity tissue motion if motion compensation (MoCo) is not considered. While many studies have recently shown the interest of deep learning for the reconstruction of high-quality static images from PW or DW, its ability to achieve such performance while maintaining the capability of tracking cardiac motion has yet to be assessed. In this article, we addressed such issue by deploying a complex-weighted convolutional neural network (CNN) for image reconstruction and a state-of-the-art speckle-tracking method. The evaluation of this approach was first performed by designing an adapted simulation framework, which provides specific reference data, i.e., high-quality, motion artifact-free cardiac images. The obtained results showed that, while using only three DWs as input, the CNN-based approach yielded an image quality and a motion accuracy equivalent to those obtained by compounding 31 DWs free of motion artifacts. The performance was then further evaluated on nonsimulated, experimental in vitro data, using a spinning disk phantom. This experiment demonstrated that our approach yielded high-quality image reconstruction and motion estimation, under a large range of velocities and outperforms a state-of-the-art MoCo-based approach at high velocities. Our method was finally assessed on in vivo datasets and showed consistent improvement in image quality and motion estimation compared to standard compounding. This demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of deep learning reconstruction for ultrafast speckle-tracking echocardiography.

Robust Imaging of Speed of Sound Using Virtual Source Transmission.

Speed of sound (SoS) is a novel imaging biomarker for assessing the biomechanical characteristics of soft tissues. SoS imaging in the pulse-echo mode using conventional ultrasound (US) systems with hand-held transducers has the potential to enable new clinical uses. Recent work demonstrated that diverging waves (DWs) from a single element (SE) transmit to outperform plane-wave sequences. However, SE transmits have severely limited power and hence produce a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in echo data. We herein propose Walsh-Hadamard (WH) coded and virtual-source (VS) transmit sequences for the improved SNR in SoS imaging. We additionally present an iterative method of estimating beamforming (BF) SoS in the medium, which otherwise confounds SoS reconstructions due to beamforming inaccuracies in the images used for reconstruction. Through numerical simulations, phantom experiments, and in vivo imaging data, we show that WH is not robust against motion, which is often unavoidable in clinical imaging scenarios. Our proposed VS sequence is shown to provide the highest SoS reconstruction performance, especially robust to motion artifacts. In phantom experiments, despite having a comparable SoS root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 17.5-18.0 m/s at rest, with a minor axial probe motion of ≈ 0.67 mm/s the RMSE for SE, WH, and VS already deteriorate to 20.2, 105.4, and 19.0 m/s, respectively, showing that WH produces unacceptable results, not robust to motion. In the clinical data, the high SNR and motion resilience of VS sequences are seen to yield superior contrast compared to SE and WH sequences.

Longitudinal Assessment of Cerebral Blood Volume Variation in Human Neonates Using Ultrafast Power Doppler and Diverging Waves

Longitudinal assessment of brain perfusion is a critical parameter for neurodevelopmental outcome of neonates undergoing cardiopulmonary bypass procedure. In this study, we aim to measure the variations of cerebral blood volume (CBV) in human neonates during cardiac surgery, using Ultrafast Power Doppler and freehand scanning. To be clinically relevant, this method must satisfy three criteria: being able to image a wide field of view in the brain, show significant longitudinal CBV variations, and present reproducible results. To address the first point, we performed for the first time transfontanellar Ultrafast Power Doppler using a hand-held phased-array transducer with diverging waves. This increased the field of view more than threefold compared to previous studies using linear transducers and plane waves. We were able to image vessels in the cortical areas as well as the deep grey matter and temporal lobes. Second, we measured the longitudinal variations of CBV on human neonates undergoing cardiopulmonary bypass. When compared to a pre-operative baseline acquisition, the CBV exhibited significant variation during bypass: on average, +20±3% in the mid-sagittal full sector (p<0.0001), -11±3% in the cortical regions (p<0.01) and -10±4% in the basal ganglia (p<0.01). Third, a trained operator performing identical scans was able to reproduce CBV estimates with a variability of 4% to 7.5% depending on the regions considered. We also investigated whether vessel segmentation could further improve reproducibility, but found that it actually introduced greater variability in the results. Overall, this study demonstrates the clinical translation of ultrafast power Doppler with diverging-waves and freehand scanning.

Convex Array With Variable Spacings (CAVS) for Ultrafast Ultrasound Diverging-Wave Imaging

The synthetic focusing of coherent plane-wave compounding (CPWC) has gradually developed from ultrasound linear array to convex array. The field of view (FOV) has been expanded compared to that of the linear array. However, the existing technology does not make the most of the convex structural advantages and FOV is greatly limited by the element number of a convex array. In this paper, based on the convex array of diverging wave (DW) imaging theory and the special structure design principles, the elements of the convex array probe are unequally spaced for better imaging quality and wider FOV. Firstly, the sound field pattern was simulated for sidelobe comparison. Then, DW imaging of the new convex array was simulated and the experiment was carried out on the tissue-mimicking ultrasound phantom using the commercial probe. Comparisons of lateral and axial variations illustrated that the convex array with variable spacings (CAVS) does improve the imaging quality when compared to the given convex array with uniform spacings. Finally, we conclude that CAVS can further extend the FOV of DW imaging by taking advantage of the structure of convex array and variable element spacings.

Speed-of-sound imaging using diverging waves

Purpose.Due to its safe, low-cost, portable, and real-time nature, ultrasound is a prominent imaging method in computer-assisted interventions. However, typical B-mode ultrasound images have limited contrast and tissue differentiation capability for several clinical applications.Methods.Recent introduction of imaging speed-of-sound (SoS) in soft tissues using conventional ultrasound systems and transducers has great potential in clinical translation providing additional imaging contrast, e.g., in intervention planning, navigation, and guidance applications. However, current pulse-echo SoS imaging methods relying on plane wave (PW) sequences are highly prone to aberration effects, therefore suboptimal in image quality. In this paper we propose using diverging waves (DW) for SoS imaging and study this comparatively to PW.Results.We demonstrate wavefront aberration and its effects on the key step of displacement tracking in the SoS reconstruction pipeline, comparatively between PW and DW on a synthetic example. We then present the parameterization sensitivity of both approaches on a set of simulated phantoms. Analyzing SoS imaging performance comparatively indicates that using DW instead of PW, the reconstruction accuracy improves by over 20% in root-mean-square-error (RMSE) and by 42% in contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR). We then demonstrate SoS reconstructions with actual US acquisitions of a breast phantom. With our proposed DW, CNR for a high contrast tumor-representative inclusion is improved by 42%, while for a low contrast cyst-representative inclusion a 2.8-fold improvement is achieved.Conclusion.SoS imaging, so far only studied using a plane wave transmission scheme, can be made more reliable and accurate using DW. The high imaging contrast of DW-based SoS imaging will thus facilitate the clinical translation of the method and utilization in computer-assisted interventions such as ultrasound-guided biopsies, where B-Mode contrast is often to low to detect potential lesions.

In Vivo Comparison of Multiline Transmission and Diverging Wave Imaging for High-Frame-Rate Speckle-Tracking Echocardiography.

High-frame-rate (HFR) speckle-tracking echocardiography (STE) assesses myocardial function by quantifying motion and deformation at high temporal resolution. Among the proposed HFR techniques, multiline transmission (MLT) and diverging wave (DW) imaging have been used in this context both being characterized by specific advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, in this article, we directly contrast both approaches in an in vivo setting while operating at the same frame rate (FR). First, images were recorded at baseline (resting condition) from healthy volunteers and patients. Next, additional acquisitions during stress echocardiography were performed on volunteers. Each scan was contoured and processed by a previously proposed 2-D HFR STE algorithm based on cross correlation. Then, strain curves and their end-systolic (ES) values were extracted for all myocardial segments for further statistical analysis. The baseline acquisitions did not reveal differences in estimated strain between the acquisition modes ( ); myocardial segments ( ); or an interaction between imaging mode and depth ( ). Similarly, during stress testing, no difference ( p = 0.7 ) was observed for the two scan sequences, stress levels or an interaction sequence-stress level ( p = 0.94 ). Overall, our findings show that MLT and DW compoundings give comparable HFR STE strain values and that the choice for using one method or the other may thus rather be based on other factors, for example, system requirements or computational cost.

Kinematics of the Ship’s Wake in the Presence of a Shear Flow

We present the kinematic model of the ship wake in the presence of horizontal subsurface current linearly varying with the depth of water. An extension of the Whitham–Lighthill theory for calm water is developed. It has been established that the structure of ship waves under the action of a shear flow can radically differ from the classical Kelvin ship wake model. Co propagating ship and shear current lead to increasing the total wedge angle up to full one 180° and decreases for the counter shear current. At relatively large unidirectional values of the shear current, cusp waves in the vicinity of the wedge boundary are represented by transverse waves and, conversely, by diverging waves directed almost perpendicular to the ship track for the opposite shear current. The presence of a shear flow crossing the direction of the ship’s movement gives a strong asymmetry of the wake. An increase in the perpendicular shear flow leads to an increase in the difference between the angles of the wake arms. The limiting value of the shear current corresponds to one or both arms angles equal to 90°. Transverse and divergent edge waves for this limiting case coincide.

Reconstruction for Diverging-Wave Imaging Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks.

In recent years, diverging wave (DW) ultrasound imaging has become a very promising methodology for cardiovascular imaging due to its high temporal resolution. However, if they are limited in number, DW transmits provide lower image quality compared with classical focused schemes. A conventional reconstruction approach consists in summing series of ultrasound signals coherently, at the expense of frame rate, data volume, and computation time. To deal with this limitation, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture, Inception for DW Network (IDNet), for high-quality reconstruction of DW ultrasound images using a small number of transmissions. In order to cope with the specificities induced by the sectorial geometry associated with DW imaging, we adopted the inception model composed of the concatenation of multiscale convolution kernels. Incorporating inception modules aims at capturing different image features with multiscale receptive fields. A mapping between low-quality images and corresponding high-quality compounded reconstruction was learned by training the network using in vitro and in vivo samples. The performance of the proposed approach was evaluated in terms of contrast ratio (CR), contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), and lateral resolution (LR), and compared with standard compounding method and conventional CNN methods. The results demonstrated that our method could produce high-quality images using only 3 DWs, yielding an image quality equivalent to that obtained with compounding of 31 DWs and outperforming more conventional CNN architectures in terms of complexity, inference time, and image quality.

A novel transcranial ultrasound imaging method with diverging wave transmission and deep learning approach

Real time brain transcranial ultrasound imaging is extremely intriguing because of its numerous applications. However, the skull causes phase distortion and amplitude attenuation of ultrasound signals due to its density: the speed of sound is significantly different in bone tissue than in soft tissue. In this study, we propose an ultrafast transcranial ultrasound imaging technique with diverging wave (DW) transmission and a deep learning approach to achieve large field-of-view with high resolution and real time brain ultrasound imaging. DW transmission provides a frame rate of several kiloHz and a large field of view that is suitable for human brain imaging via a small acoustic window. However, it suffers from poor image quality because the diverging waves are all unfocused. Here, we adopted adaptive beamforming algorithms to improve both the image contrast and the lateral resolution. Both simulated and in situ experiments with a human skull resulted in significant image improvements. However, the skull still introduces a wavefront offset and distortion, which degrades the image quality even when adaptive beamforming methods are used. Thus, we also employed a U-Net neural network to detect the contour and position of the skull directly from the acquired RF signal matrix. This approach avoids the need for beamforming, image reconstruction, and image segmentation, making it more suitable for clinical use.

ГРАФИЧЕСКИЙ АНАЛИЗ ВОЛНОВЫХ ПОЛЕЙ СВОБОДНОЙ ПОВЕРХНОСТИ ВОДЫ ОТ ДВИЖУЩИХСЯ СУДОВ И ПАРЫ ПОСЛЕДОВАТЕЛЬНО РАСПОЛОЖЕННЫХ СТОЕК

The paper presents a comparison of the photographic material of the wave patterns resulted from the movement of a ship in situ and a model ship, as well as from two consecutive posts, their regularities being found through graphical processing. The possibility to find the fore imaginary source of Kelvin wave pattern forming the ship's wave system is given at a distance &#x0D; of one wavelength before the top of the bow retaining wave. The equality of the length of trans-verse waves and divergent waves along the outer boundaries of the latter zone is fixed. It has been assumed that the intermediate waves generated between the main waves in the model ship and the posts are regular, imposition of wave patterns in a pair of consistently moving racks depending on the hit of the rear rack in the wave field of the first rack has been stated. Regularly occurring flows around moving posts are discussed. The bow and stern system of Kelvin waves in a ship wave sys-tem has been illustrated (the angle of the midpoint of diverging wave crests with the ship’s diamet-rical plane and the angle of diverging wave crests with the ship’s diametrical plane). The photo-graphs presented were taken in the experimental tank of Siberian State University of Water Transport (Novosibirsk State Academy of Water Transport) in 2006. A thin film naturally generat-ed on the water surface of the experimental tank and given a structure directed along the tank due to previous runs helped to visualize the distortion of the free water surface in better quality and to obtain clearly outlined contours in lighting.

A novel transcranial ultrasound imaging method with diverging wave.

Real time transcranial ultrasound imaging of brain can be extremely intriguing because of its numerous applications. In this study, we proposed an ultrafast transcranial ultrasound imaging technique with diverging wave (DW) transmission, which has been a promising technique to image moving objects, such as complex blood flow field and transient elastography. However, diverging waves are all unfocused waves, which makes their image quality, especially the lateral resolution and contrast, has not yet been satisfactory. Here we tried to apply the adaptive beamforming algorithms to improve both the image contrast and the lateral resolution. Simulation and phantom experiments proved that our methods can significantly improve the DW image quality. Finally, transcranial ultrasound imaging collected through temporal bone were presented and analyzed. The ultrasound frequency used in this study ranges from 2 MHz to 4 MHz, centered at 2.8 MHz. Since the wavefront was offset and distorted after passing through temporal bone, the image quality will be slightly degraded. Even then, it was demonstrated that these adaptive algorithms can significantly improve the transcranial image quality, especially the image contrast.

A Physical Model of Nonstationary Blur in Ultrasound Imaging

While restoration methods have been extensively studied in ultrasound (US) imaging, only few recent works have focused on modeling and understanding the blur from a physical point of view even in simple configurations, such as lossless homogeneous media. Despite a highly nonstationary blur due to diffraction effects, many techniques rely on simplistic approximations based on shift-invariant models or sectional methods and their efficiency has not been demonstrated for plane-wave (PW) and diverging-wave (DW) imaging. In this paper, we first propose a physical model of nonstationary blur in the context of PW and DW imaging. The blur operation is expressed as a composition of a U.S. propagation operator and a delay-and-sum operator, each of which has derived in previous works. We show that such a composition leads to a standard model of nonstationary blur as a Fredholm integral of the first kind. Second, we describe an approximation of the blur in the discrete domain based on the above decomposition coupled with an appropriate discretization of the latent element-raw-data space. We show theoretically and empirically that its evaluation, using such an approximation, scales linearly instead of quadratically with respect to the grid size, better than shift-invariant approaches. Through simulations and in vivo experimental data, we demonstrate that using the proposed model in the context of maximum-a-posteriori image restoration results in a higher image quality than using state-of-the-art shift-invariant models.

High-Frame-Rate Contrast-Enhanced Echocardiography Using Diverging Waves: 2-D Motion Estimation and Compensation.

Combining diverging ultrasound waves and microbubbles could improve contrast-enhanced echocardiography (CEE), by providing enhanced temporal resolution for cardiac function assessment over a large imaging field of view. However, current image formation techniques using coherent summation of echoes from multiple steered diverging waves (DWs) are susceptible to tissue and microbubble motion artifacts, resulting in poor image quality. In this study, we used correlation-based 2-D motion estimation to perform motion compensation for CEE using DWs. The accuracy of this motion estimation method was evaluated with Field II simulations. The root-mean-square velocity errors were 5.9% ± 0.2% and 19.5% ± 0.4% in the axial and lateral directions, when normalized to the maximum value of 62.8 cm/s which is comparable to the highest speed of blood flow in the left ventricle (LV). The effects of this method on image contrast ratio (CR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) were tested in vitro using a tissue mimicking rotating disk with a diameter of 10 cm. Compared against the control without motion compensation, a mean increase of 12 dB in CR and 7 dB in CNR were demonstrated when using this motion compensation method. The motion correction algorithm was tested in vivo on a CEE data set acquired with the Ultrasound Array Research Platform II performing coherent DW imaging. Improvement of the B-mode and contrast-mode image quality with cardiac motion and blood flow-induced microbubble motion was achieved. The results of motion estimation were further processed to interpret blood flow in the LV. This allowed for a triplex cardiac imaging technique, consisting of B mode, contrast mode, and 2-D vector flow imaging with a high frame rate of 250 Hz.

Prototype of an Echo-PIV Method for Use in Underwater Nuclear Decommissioning Inspections

The ongoing decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi (1F) nuclear power plant requires the inspection of the inside of containment vessels that have been submerged in water. These inspections must locate leaks and map the distribution of fuel debris in water with very low visibility. This paper reports the design and testing of an echo-PIV system that uses a single divergent signal wave and delay-and-sum processing to efficiently map the interior and fluid flow within a submerged vessel. The diverging wave and delay-and-sum processing improve upon the performance of conventional ultrasound PIV methods specifically to meet the demands of containment vessel inspections. The imaging method uses an ultrasonic linear sensor array that emits a diverging wave that covers a wide angle with a single transmission. The delay-and-sum algorithm combines echo signals recorded by each element of the sensor array. We optimized the design of an echo-PIV system in laboratory-scale tests, and then tested the prototype with a mockup of a containment vessel in a water tank. The small-scale prototype successfully located a mock leak and mapped the surface of a piece of mock debris. This prototype can be scaled up readily for inspections at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

Compressed Sensing Based Synthetic Transmit Aperture for Phased Array Using Hadamard Encoded Diverging Wave Transmissions

Previously, we proposed compressed sensing based synthetic transmit aperture (CS-STA) to improve the contrast and frame rate of STA while maintaining its spatial resolution in linear array by choosing uniform random matrix as the measurement matrix and transmitting the plane waves (PWs). In this paper, to extend CS-STA for phased array imaging and further improve its performance, we design four types of CS-STA implementations with different combinations of measurement matrices (i.e., uniform random and Hadamard matrices) and transmitted waves [i.e., PW and diverging wave (DW)]. Through simulations and phantom experiments with a 3 MHz, 64-element phased array, we find that type-IV CS-STA with the combination of a Hadamard matrix and DW outperforms the other three implementations including the previously proposed type-I CS-STA in terms of image quality and reconstruction time. Specifically, PW transmission produces visible discontinuity and the reconstruction time with uniform random matrix is about 100-fold longer than that with the Hadamard matrix. Compared with STA, with eightfold higher frame rate, type-IV CS-STA achieves 8.2 and 12.3 dB higher contrast-to-noise ratio and signal-to-noise ratio in the simulations, respectively. These improvements are slightly lower in the phantom experiments, which are 6.2 and 6.6 dB, respectively. In addition, CS-STA does not deteriorate the spatial resolution of STA, with the maximum deterioration being smaller than 1/8 wavelength. These results demonstrate that type-IV CS-STA can achieve phased array imaging with high image quality at high frame rate and may be beneficial to cardiac imaging.

Experimental 3-D Ultrasound Imaging with 2-D Sparse Arrays using Focused and Diverging Waves

Three dimensional ultrasound (3-D US) imaging methods based on 2-D array probes are increasingly investigated. However, the experimental test of new 3-D US approaches is contrasted by the need of controlling very large numbers of probe elements. Although this problem may be overcome by the use of 2-D sparse arrays, just a few experimental results have so far corroborated the validity of this approach. In this paper, we experimentally compare the performance of a fully wired 1024-element (32 × 32) array, assumed as reference, to that of a 256-element random and of an “optimized” 2-D sparse array, in both focused and compounded diverging wave (DW) transmission modes. The experimental results in 3-D focused mode show that the resolution and contrast produced by the optimized sparse array are close to those of the full array while using 25% of elements. Furthermore, the experimental results in 3-D DW mode and 3-D focused mode are also compared for the first time and they show that both the contrast and the resolution performance are higher when using the 3-D DW at volume rates up to 90/second which represent a 36x speed up factor compared to the focused mode.

Diverging wave compounding with spatio-temporal encoding using orthogonal Golay pairs for high frame rate imaging

Golay coded excitation for diverging wave compounding (DWC) has been demonstrated to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and contrast for high frame rate cardiac imaging. However, the complementary codes need to be transmitted in two consecutive firings for decoding, which reduces the frame rate by 2 folds. This paper proposes an orthogonal Golay pairs coded (OGPs-coded) DWC sequence to overcome this problem, which implements spatio-temporal encoding for DWC. Two diverging waves (DWs) at different steering angles coded by an orthogonal Golay pair are transmitted simultaneously, thus compensating the frame rate reduction caused by transmissions of complementary codes. The two DWs can be separated based on the orthogonality of Golay pairs. To test the feasibility of the proposed sequence, we performed simulations of point targets and tissue phantoms in both static and moving states. Compared with non-coded DWC at the same frame rate, OGPs-coded DWC obtains comparable resolution, SNR gains of 7.5–10 dB and contrast gains of 3–5 dB. The OGPs-coded DWC sequence was also tested experimentally on a tissue-mimicking phantom. Compared with non-coded DWC, OGPs-coded DWC achieves improvements in the SNR (3–6 dB) and contrast (1–2 dB). Preliminary in vivo results show brighter myocardium and larger penetration depth with the proposed method. The proposed OGPs-coded DWC sequence has potential for high frame rate and high quality cardiac imaging.

Coded excitation for diverging wave cardiac imaging: a feasibility study

Diverging wave (DW) based cardiac imaging has gained increasing interest in recent years given its capacity to achieve ultrahigh frame rate. However, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), contrast, and penetration depth of the resulting B-mode images are typically low as DWs spread energy over a large region. Coded excitation is known to be capable of increasing the SNR and penetration for ultrasound imaging. The aim of this study was therefore to test the feasibility of applying coded excitation in DW imaging to improve the corresponding SNR, contrast and penetration depth. To this end, two types of codes, i.e. a linear frequency modulated chirp code and a set of complementary Golay codes were tested in three different DW imaging schemes, i.e. 1 angle DW transmit without compounding, 3 and 5 angles DW transmits with coherent compounding. The performances (SNR, contrast ratio (CR), contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), and penetration) of different imaging schemes were investigated by means of simulations and in vitro experiments. As for benchmark, corresponding DW imaging schemes with regular pulsed excitation as well as the conventional focused imaging scheme were also included. The results showed that the SNR was improved by about 10 dB using coded excitation while the penetration depth was increased by 2.5 cm and 1.8 cm using chirp code and Golay codes, respectively. The CNR and CR gains varied with the depth for different DW schemes using coded excitations. Specifically, for non-compounded DW imaging schemes, the gain in the CR was about 5 dB and 3 dB while the gain in the CNR was about 4.5 dB and 3.5 dB at larger depths using chirp code and Golay codes, respectively. For compounded imaging schemes, using coded excitation, the gain in the penetration and contrast were relatively smaller compared to non-compounded ones. Overall, these findings indicated the feasibility of coded excitation in improving the image quality of DW imaging. Preliminary in vivo cardiac images of a healthy volunteer were presented finally, and higher SNR and deeper penetration depth can be achieved by coded schemes.

Diverging Wave Volumetric Imaging Using Subaperture Beamforming.

Several clinical settings could benefit from 3-D high frame rate (HFR) imaging and, in particular, HFR 3-D tissue Doppler imaging (TDI). To date, the proposed methodologies are based mostly on experimental ultrasound platforms, making their translation to clinical systems nontrivial as these have additional hardware constraints. In particular, clinically used 2-D matrix array transducers rely on subaperture (SAP) beamforming to limit cabling between the ultrasound probe and the back-end console. Therefore, this paper is aimed at assessing the feasibility of HFR 3-D TDI using diverging waves (DWs) on a clinical transducer with SAP beamforming limitations. Simulation studies showed that the combination of a single DW transmission with SAP beamforming results in severe imaging artifacts due to grating lobes and reduced penetration. Interestingly, a promising tradeoff between image quality and frame rate was achieved for scan sequences with a moderate number of transmit beams. In particular, a sparse sequence with nine transmissions showed good imaging performance for an imaging sector of 70 °×70 ° at volume rates of approximately 600 Hz. Subsequently, this sequence was implemented in a clinical system and TDI was recorded in vivo on healthy subjects. Velocity curves were extracted and compared against conventional TDI (i.e., with focused transmit beams). The results showed similar velocities between both beamforming approaches, with a cross-correlation of 0.90 ± 0.11 between the traces of each mode. Overall, this paper indicates that HFR 3-D TDI is feasible in systems with clinical 2-D matrix arrays, despite the limitations of SAP beamforming.