Efficient ultrasonic synthetic aperture imaging

Synthetic aperture imaging employing a single active array channel in data acquisition, enables low cost systems to be realised, but produces poor image quality. An investigation is presented into a new synthetic aperture system which uses a single active transmit element and two active receive elements to carry out data acquisition. This approach improves the image quality by suppressing the grating and sidelobes, while preserving the simplicity of the front-end hardware.