Simultaneous coded plane wave imaging in ultrasound: Problem formulation and constraints

In this paper, we propose a new emission strategy in the context of plane wave imaging. Plane wave imaging indeed implies compounding in order to preserve a good image quality. Such compounding is usually obtained using multiple, successive emissions, which in turn yields a decrease of the frame rate. As opposed to this approach, our method is based on the simultaneous emission of several coded plane waves. This allows the reconstruction of all the images corresponding to the different plane waves, by using an inverse problem approach. The proposed method is closely related to channel estimation in telecommunications, and coded excitation in synthetic aperture ultrasound imaging. In this paper, we extend these lines of work to the case of ultrasound plane wave imaging and evaluate the obtained performance from various numerical simulations.