Implementation of a novel transmit- receive scheme using only 8 active elements: Preliminary Results

Recently, a novel two-element scanner was introduced for a high-frequency ultrasound system, which utilized non-linear receive beamformers (e.g., Filtered Delay Euclidean-Weighted Multiply and Sum (F-DewMAS)). In this work, we explore this approach of using sparse aperture (8R) in combination with non-linear beamformer at clinical frequency. Specifically, the proposed approach is tried on existing Synthetic Transmit Aperture and Diverging Beam with Synthetic Aperture Technique (DB-SAT). These are referred to as 8 R-STA and 8 -DB-SAT, respectively. Experiments were conducted on tissue mimicking phantom and an example in-vivo acquisition. $C R$ and $C N R$ values of the resulting B-mode images were measured and compared with the conventional 128 element receive aperture. The $C R$ and $C N R$ values of the proposed method shows improvement when compared with Delay and Sum (DAS) beamformer employed on DBSAT with 128 receive elements.