Beamspace sparse representation weighting beamforming for plane wave emission ultrasound instrument

Plane wave (PW) emission has the potential advantages of reducing the size of high-voltage pulse-generating circuits and achieving high-frame-rate (HFR) in ultrasound instrument. However, because of the unfocused beams, the signal-noise ratio (SNR) and resolution decrease rapidly compared with the traditional ultrasound device. In order to alleviate the problems, we propose a novel adaptive beamforming method suitable for PW emission based on beamspace sparse representation (SR) weighting. SR with an overcomplete basis can accurately distinguish correlated or even coherent broadband signals coming from different positions in a single realization of data. Therefore beamspace weighting beamforming based on SR can enhance the on-axis signals while suppressing the interference from the off-axis ones thoroughly and improve the resolution and SNR of PW emission ultrasonic imaging system. We performed a simulation to test our proposed algorithm and compared it with conventional delay-and-sum (DAS), minimum variance beamformer (MVBF) and phase coherence factor (PCF). The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve higher resolution in PW emission.