Multi-line transmission for 3D ultrasound imaging: AN experimental study

Achieving a high frame rate in echocardiography is highly important for quantifying the short phases of the cardiac cycle that contain valuable information for medical diagnosis. Additionally, the 3D quantitative assessment of the heart would significantly improve the current measurements used in daily clinical routine. Nevertheless, obtaining ultrafast images remains a challenge due to the trade-off between the image quality and a high frame rate, especially when volumetric data is acquired. Among the current ultrafast imaging methods, multi-line-transmit imaging (MLT) provides an increased frame rate but in the same time mostly preserves the image quality. However, the current implementation of this method in 3D proposed by Ortega et al. [IEEE TUFC 2016] is based on generating the MLT data synthetically by summing up the raw data before beamforming. In this paper we present the first real-time implementation of the MLT in 3D ultrasound.