Synthetic transmit beam technique in an aberrating environment

Parallel beamforming is a commonly used method for increasing the frame rate in ultrasound imaging systems. By receiving in several directions for each transmission, the frame rate is increased. However, this method also introduces blocklike artifacts in the B-mode image, due to the reception offsets when compared with the transmission direction. The synthetic transmit beam technique (STB) has been previously proposed as a compensation technique when addressing these artifacts. Previous work by Hergum et al. investigated the performance of this method in regard to the case of 2 parallel beams in tissue mimicking phantoms without aberrations. This study is a continuation of that work in which this method is tested in an aberrating environment using 4 parallel beams. Several quantitative and qualitative performance aspects of this method have been investigated such as lateral shift invariance, beam-to-beam correlation fluctuations, speckle- tracking performance, improvements from higher order STB interpolation and beam profile shape preservation, as well as perceived image quality improvements. The results were obtained from simulations, in vivo measurements, and in vitro measurements. The results showed that aberration amplified the image artifacts for regular parallel beamforming, which resulted in more shift variance, lower beam-to-beam correlation, higher speckle- tracking error, and more variation in beam profile shape. Compared with regular parallel beamforming, STB resulted in a significantly better image quality and a higher score in all measuring methods. The improvements from using STB were largest in cases involving aberration. Using STB, the variation in beam-to-beam correlation was reduced from 30% to 1%, and the standard deviation of the speckle-tracking error was reduced from 8% to 1.5%.