High Quality Ultrafast Imaging with Transmit Extrapolation

Plane wave imaging (PWI) and diverging wave imaging (DWI) can achieve high frame rate by coherently compounding beamsum data from broad transmit beams at different angles. However, many transmits are still needed as image quality degradation occurs with reduced number of transmit angles in PWI/DWI. Specifically, a reduced transmit angular span results in degraded lateral resolution in the synthetic transmit beam. We propose a transmit extrapolation (TEX) technique, which employs a linear prediction scheme to predict unavailable beamsum data based on beamsum data available from a limited number and span of PW/DW transmit angles. The original and predicted beamsum data are then coherently compounded to achieve image quality superior to that with only the original beamsum data, thereby overcoming the inherent trade-off between frame rate and image quality. We evaluate our TEX technique on the PICMUS dataset. Our results suggest that TEX has potential to enable ultrafast imaging without compromising image quality.