Abstract
Improvement of frame-rate is very important for high quality ultrasound imaging of fast-moving structures. It is also one of the key technologies of Three-Dimension (3-D) real-time medical imaging. In this paper, we have demonstrated a beamforming method which gives imaging frame-rate increment without sacrificing the quality of medical images. By using wider and fewer transmit beams in combination with four narrower parallel receive beams, potentially increasing the imaging frame-rate by a factor four. Through employing full transmit aperture, controlling the mainlobe width, and suppressing sidelobes of angular responses, the inherent gain loss of normal parallel beamfomer can be compensated in the maximal degree. The noise and interference signals also can be suppressed effectively. Finally, we show comparable lateral resolution and contrast of ultrasound images to normal single widow weighting beamformer on simulated phantoms of point targets, cyst and fetus of 12th week. As the computational cost is linear with the number of array elements and the same with Delay And Sum (DAS) beamformers, this method has great advantages of possibility for high frame-rate real-time applications.
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Communication author: Wang Lutao, born in 1979, male, Ph. D. candidate.
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Wang, L., Jin, G. & Xu, H. High resolution real-time medical imaging based on parallel beamforming technique. J. Electron.(China) 28, 558–564 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11767-012-0773-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11767-012-0773-3