Virtualizing the Receive Aperture: ViRC for Enhanced Single-Shot Ultrasound Imaging

Plane wave imaging (PWI) enables ultrafast ultrasound acquisition but often suffers from degraded image quality due to the lack of transmit focusing. To overcome this limitation, we propose Virtual Receive Compounding (ViRC), a general framework that enhances single-plane wave imaging by synthesizing multiple virtual receive angles. By constructing virtual arrays and applying angle-dependent delays at the reception side, ViRC achieves coherent multi-angle compounding without additional transmissions. This approach improves lateral resolution and significantly enhances image contrast. Phantom and in vivo experiments show that ViRC yields 1–2 dB gains in contrast metrics for phantoms and up to 3 dB improvements in vivo, while maintaining similar noise levels. Moreover, ViRC can be seamlessly combined with advanced beamforming methods, establishing it as an efficient and versatile solution for high-quality ultrafast ultrasound imaging.