High-frame rate 3D-synthetic transmit aperture imaging with a reduced number of measurement channels

This paper presents a high-frame rate, 3D synthetic transmit aperture system combined with a micro-beamforming technique to reduce the number of measurement channels M (the product of number of transmissions, n(T), and the number of receiving channels in each transmission, no). Adjacent elements were combined along both the lateral and the elevational direction into groups by applying proper delays in transmission and receiving to focus the beams at a specific region of interest. After the M channels of RF data were acquired, the frequency-domain spatial response function was used to reconstruct the ultrasound images. We have demonstrated that using this approach with a 9 fold reduction in transmission events and 49-fold reduction in receiving channels can achieve the comparable image quality with standard synthetic transmit aperture using a full array. The approach may help in realizing clinical applications of real-time 3D ultrasound imaging technology using large arrays