Portable Ultrasound Through Compressive Beamforming with Improved Contrast

This paper describes the newly developed method for compressing the data in the analog domain to as low as one channel, thus radically reducing the hardware requirements. The compressed data is then recovered to full aperture RF data by using non-linear estimation techniques before applying traditional beamforming and image formation. This method consistently achieves comparable or superior resolution as compared to the traditional delay-and-sum methods. A Verasonics V1 ultrasonic scanner is used to demonstrate the method on both cysts phantoms and in vivo, and to measure contrast ratio (CR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR). Depending on the choice of estimation parameters, CR and CNR are on par with traditional methods or better, making the described method competitive with traditional methods.