Simultaneous coded plane wave imaging: Implementation on a research echograph

Recent theoretical study [1] showed that the concept of simultaneous coded plane wave imaging has the potential to yield good image qualities at much higher frame rates than coherent plane wave compounding. In this paper we present the feasibility of this method on an ultrasound (US) scanner widely used in US research and present the first acquisition results on some handmade wire and cyst phantoms. By writing a simplified direct model of wave propagation and using a Least Square Estimator (LSE) based on the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to solve the inverse problem we show that the received data can be reconstructed in such way that simultaneous emitted plane waves yield disjointed images. The performance of the LSE is increased by using temporal encoding of the plane waves with pseudo-orthogonal codes. In the context of noisy acquisition the stability of the estimator is discussed and the evolution of the solution is presented.