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Portable, hand-held ultrasound devices capable of 3D imaging in real time are the next generation of the medical imaging apparatus adapted not only for professional medical stuff but for a wide group of less advanced users. Limited power supply capacity and the relatively small number of channels used for the ultrasound data acquisition are the most important limitations that should be taken into account when designing such devices and when developing the corresponding image reconstruction algorithms. The aim of this study was to develop a new 3D ultrasound imaging method which would take into account the above-mentioned features of the new generation of ultrasonic devices -- low-cost portable general access scanners. It was based on the synthetic transmit aperture (STA) method combined with the Fourier spectrum domain (SD) acoustic data processing. The STA using a limited number of elements in transmit and receive modes for ultrasound data acquisition allowed both aforementioned constraints to be obeyed simultaneously. Moreover, the computational speed of the fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm utilized for the ultrasound image synthesis in the spectrum domain makes the proposed method to be more competitive compared to the conventional time domain (TD) STA method based on the delay-and-sum (DAS) technique, especially in the case of 3D imaging in real time mode. Performance of the proposed method was verified using numerical 3D acoustic data simulated in the Field II program for MATLAB and using experimental data from the custom design 3D scattering phantom collected by means of the Verasonics Vantage 256™ research ultrasound system equipped with the dedicated 1024-element 2D matrix transducer. The method proposed in this paper was about 80 times faster than its counterpart based on the time domain synthetic transmit aperture (TD-STA) approach in the numerical example of a single 3D ultrasound image synthesized from 4 partial images each containing 64 x 64 x 512 pixels. It was also shown that the acceleration of the image reconstruction was achieved at the cost of a slight deterioration in the image quality assessed by the contrast and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is an experimental study of the most crucial parameters of the received acoustic signals (e.g. signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), side-lobes level (SLL), axial resolution) obtained as a result of simultaneous emission of mutually orthogonal Golay complementary sequences (MOGCS) to demonstrate their feasibility of being used in ultrasound diagnostics. Application of the MOGCS in ultrasound measurements allows the image reconstruction time to be shortened without decreasing the resulting quality of reconstructed images in comparison with regular complementary Golay coded sequences (CGCS). In this paper two sets of 16-bits long MOGCS were implemented in the Verasonics Vantage™ (Verasonics Inc., Kirkland, WA, USA) scanner. Ultrasound data were generated using a perfect reflector, a custom-made nylon wire phantom and tissue mimicking phantom. Parameters of the detected MOGCS echoes like SNR, SLL and axial resolution were determined and compared to that of the standard CGCS and the short two-sine cycles pulse. It was evidenced that applying MOGCS did not compromise the parameters of the separated and compressed echoes in comparison to the other types of transmitted signal - the CGCS and the short pulse. Concretely, both the MOGCS and CGCS yield similar SNR increase in comparison to the short pulse. Almost similar values of the axial resolution estimated at the full width at the half maximum level for all types of the transmitted signals were also obtained. At the same time, using the MOGCS the data acquisition speed can be increased twice in comparison with the CGCS signal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper the concept of synthetic aperture used for high resolution/high frame rate ultrasonic imaging is reviewed. The synthetic aperture technique allows building extended 'virtual' apertures, synthesized from smaller real aperture resulting in improved lateral resolution along full penetration depth without sacrificing the frame rate. Especially, four methods, synthetic aperture focusing (SAF), multi-element synthetic aperture focusing (M-SAF), synthetic receive aperture (SRA) and synthetic transmit aperture (STA) are addressed. The effective aperture function, describing two-way, far field radiation is a useful tool in beam pattern analysis. Some basic notations, which are used to calculate the effective aperture are introduced in Appendix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]