Synthetic aperture imaging with thinned linear sensor arrays for medical ultrasound

In this paper, we exploit motion for improving the ultrasound (US) imaging performance of thinned sensor array systems. Thinned arrays provide reduced system cost and allows for the reduction of bulky channel cables. However, thinned array systems suffer from poor array processing performance from the lack of channels available to the system when compared to a Uniform Linear Array (ULA). To overcome these deficiencies we propose to use motion to augment the transmit/receive events such that a general thinned array can be made to perform statistically equivalently to a ULA. The key feature of this work is that the statistical equivalence does not depend on realizing all missing sensors, instead the equivalence is at the level of the sum co-array. We show simulation results that demonstrate the system equivalence of thinned arrays with about one-third of the active sensors compared to a ULA of equal aperture.