Sparse Arrays Method with Minimum Variance for High Quality Image in Ultrasound Ultrafast Imaging

Sparse arrays combined with Minimum Variance (SMV) beamformer is suggested to improve the data rate while maintaining the quality image of ultrafast ultrasound imaging. The motivation is that obtaining high quality images requires the acquisition, processing and storage of a large amount of data so that, with sparsity (disabled some array elements positions in the reception), the amount of data to be stored should be reduced in order to increase the scan rate. The experiments of the proposed method were performed using simulated and in-vivo dataset available in the PICMUS website. The tests were performed using 128 elements for transmission and 128, 65, 44, and 23 elements sparsely distributed in the reception. The performance evaluation has been done using the Full Width at Half Maximum (FWHM) and the Contrast Ratio (CR). Results showed that the images generated by the proposed method, with reduced number of active elements in the reception, were close to those provided by DAS in terms of spatial resolutions and contrast, indicating that the proposed SMV method is suitable for ultrasound imaging.