Higher-frame-rate ultrasound imaging with reduced cross-talk by combining a synthetic aperture and spatial coded excitation

In recent clinical practice of ultrasound imaging, the importance of high-frame-rate imaging is growing. Simultaneous multiple transmission is one way to increase frame rate while maintaining a spatial resolution and signal-to-noise ratio. However, this technique has an inherent issue in that "cross-talk artifacts" appear between the multiple transmitted pulses. In this study, a novel method providing higher-frame-rate ultrasound imaging with reduced cross-talk by combining a synthetic aperture and spatial coded excitation is proposed. In the proposed method, two coded transmission beams are simultaneously excited during beam steering in the lateral direction. Parallel receive beamforming is then performed in the region around individual transmission beams. Decoding is carried out by using two beamformed signals from a region where laterally neighboring transmission beams overlap. All decoded beamformed signals are then synthesized coherently. The proposed method was evaluated using a simulated phantom image under the assumption of imaging with a general sector probe. Results showed that the method achieved twice the frame rate while maintaining image resolution (105%) and reducing cross-talk artifacts from −37 dB to less than −57 dB.