Compressed sensing based synthetic transmit aperture for phased array imaging

Based on the linear relationship of channel data between synthetic transmit aperture (STA) and apodized plane wave (PW) firings, we previously proposed compressed sensing (CS) based STA (CS-STA) for linear array, which achieves higher frame rate and higher contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) than STA while maintaining its high resolution. Because diverging wave (DW) instead of PW is usually adopted in phased array, in this study, we adapt CS-STA to phased array configuration by compensating for the time delays associated with DW firing. This adapted CS-STA method was validated in simulations and phantom experiments by comparing CS-STA with STA. The simulations show that in the noise-free condition, CS-STA is capable of recovering the full STA channel dataset with tolerable error. In the Gaussian noise condition, CS-STA significantly reduces the visible noise of STA and improve the CNR and contrast ratio (CR). The phantom experiments further demonstrate that CS-STA reduces the visible noise and improves the CNR and CR of STA with higher frame rate while remaining the resolution of STA. In conclusion, it is proved that CS-STA in phased array is feasible and has the same advantages as in linear array.