Inter-transmission adaptive weighting for suppressing grating artifact in high-frame-rate synthetic transmit aperture beamforming

摘要

Synthetic Transmit Aperture (STA) is a principal technology of a modern medical ultrasound beamforming. The improved resolution of STA will be a strong feature especially for cardiovascular diagnosis whereas a pitfall exists in increasing the frame rate up to 250 fps without the image degradation. One of the causes is a grating lobe by the coarse transmission-channel which manifests in the blurred low brightness region in the accelerated frame-rate images. This is also a general issue for high-frame-rate technologies including plane wave imaging. The purpose of this study is to propose inter-transmission adaptive weighting (ITAW) for the suppressed grating lobe artifacts by the coarse transmission channel in the STA imaging.