Hyper-beam Coherent Plane Wave Compounding for Improving Localization Accuracy of Ultrasound Localization Microscopy

Ultrasound localization microscopy (ULM) is a powerful technique for microvessel imaging, enabling researches on microvessel-related diseases such as tumors, diabetes, and strokes. Coherent plane wave compounding (CPWC) is a commonly used ultrafast beamforming method in ULM, but because of its delay-and-sum diffractive nature it inevitably suffers high sidelobes and a wide point spread function (PSF), limiting the effectiveness for precise localization. Recent studies have applied adaptive beamforming techniques, e.g., minimum variance beamformer, to address this issue, which comes with high computational complexity. Here we propose a novel hyper-beam coherent plane wave compounding technique (HB-CPWC) for ULM that yields a hyper narrow PSF and thus can improve the accuracy of microvessel localization of about 20% while owning similar computational complexity to CPWC's.