Synthetic Aperture Ultrasound Imaging Using Frequency-Domain Reconstruction to Reduce Computational Complexity

A new implementation of a synthetic aperture focusing technique is presented in the paper. Standard medical ultrasound imaging is done using line-by-line transmission with classical Delay-and-Sum (DAS) image reconstruction. Synthetic aperture imaging, however, has a better resolution and frame rate in cost of more computational load. To overcome this problem, block processing algorithms are used in radar and sonar which are relatively unknown in medical. To extend the methods to medical field, one should concern the parameters difference such as carrier frequency, signal band width, beam width and depth of imaging. In this paper, we extended one of these methods called wavenumber to medical ultrasound imaging with a simple model of synthetic aperture focus. We have also used chirp pulse excitation followed by matched filtering, windowing and spotlighting algorithm to compensate the effect of differences in parameters between radar and medical imaging. Computational complexity of the two reconstruction methods, wavenumber and DAS, have been calculated. Field II simulated point data has been used to evaluate the results in terms of resolution and contrast. Evaluations with simulated data show that for typical phantoms, reconstruction by wavenumber algorithm is almost 20 times faster than classical DAS while retaining the resolution.