Experimental Validation of Compound Mask for Enhanced Diverging Wave Ultrasound Imaging

Ultrafast ultrasound imaging using diverging waves overcomes the limitation of ultrafast imaging using plane waves by enabling rapid acquisition with wide field-of-view coverage. However, conventional transmit apodization techniques that improve image quality in focused imaging cannot be directly applied in diverging wave imaging (DWI) due to the formation of synthetic beams through coherent compounding. Recently, we introduced a closed-form approach that geometrically maps transmit apodization weights used in synthetic aperture imaging(SAI) to weights that can be applied to each virtual source transmission during coherent compounding in DWI. This paper represents the experimental validation of the compound mask approach using a Linear array and a Verasonic scanner for a multi-purpose phantom. The results confirms the efficacy of the proposed approach in improving the lateral resolution using in vitro data.