Sequential CPWC: From ultrafast to ultralight

摘要

Based on coherent plane-wave compounding (CPWC) and synthetic aperture sequential beamforming (SASB) we propose a two stage CPWC beamformer able to reduce the number of channels between probe and the scanner by a factor of 4 without a significant loss in image quality. Further reduction, of up to a factor of 18, is possible at the cost of a drop in contrast ratio of 2.3 dB, but lateral resolution remains almost unchanged. The propose method may be significantly simpler to implement in the probe than SASB, but it may also increase thermal noise significantly.