Plane-wave ultrasound imaging based on compressive sensing with low memory occupation

Coherent compounding method for plane-wave ultrasound imaging has been widely used in many frontier research areas. However, it still needs to find a compromise between the frame rate and image quality, which restricts its wider implementation. How to maintain the high frame rate and improve the image quality at the same time, has become a significant issue on plane-wave imaging technique. Although several methods based on compressive sensing (CS) have been proposed in previous studies, they still have some limitations, especially on the memory occupation and the amount of computation. In this paper, a novel CS-based beamforming method used for plane-wave ultrasound imaging is proposed and its image quality has been verified on several simulated phantoms. In this method, only the relationship between the time-delay information and the spatial distribution of the scatterers is considered when establishing the encoding matrix. In addition, the encoding matrix is expressed totally in time-domain with a dictionary-searching concept, and can be sparse-expressed with very low memory occupation. The imaging results have been compared with the traditional DAS method and the coherent compounding method. The image quality of CS method has been verified to be better than the traditional DAS method and even the coherent compounding method. The proposed method can be easily implemented on some low-cost hardware platforms, and can obtain ultrasound images with both high frame rate and good image quality, which make it has a great potential for clinical application.