Ray Theory-Based Transcranial Phase Correction for Intracranial Imaging: A Phantom Study

Ultrasonic imaging provides a non-invasive way to diagnose brain disease. However, due to imaging degradation effects from the phase-aberration and reverberation, it is still challenging to achieve an accurate transcranial imaging. The objective of this work is to improve the quality of transcranial imaging. To this end, a ray theory based transcranial phase correction method was proposed to correct the phase abberation induced by cranial bones. With the pre-knowledge of the shape and longitudinal velocity of the cranial bones, the corrected phases are derived by solving eikonal equation (ray-theory). The Ideal Synthetic Aperture Focusing Technique (I-SAFT) is applied for signal acquisitions in simulations and in-vitro phantom experiment with one-element transmitting and all-element receiving method. Dynamic focusing is achieved at each imaging position with I-SAFT and the transcranial imaging distortion is modified with the proposed phase correction method. Simulations and experiments show that the imaging distortion of target circular phantoms was corrected, and the imaging quality is improved after the phase correction. With the proposed method, the average error of the central position of target phantoms decreases from 1.98 mm to 0.21 mm, the eccentricity of fitted ellipse averagely decreases from 0.63 to 0.19, and the average maximum luminance contrast of phantoms improves from 37.36dB to 42.41dB. It is illustrated that the proposed ray-theory based phase correction method might be useful for intracranial imaging.