Harmonic imaging with fresnel beamforming in the presence of phase aberration

Fresnel beamforming is a beamforming method with a delay profile similar in shape to a physical Fresnel lens. The advantage of Fresnel beamforming is the reduced channel count, which consists of four to eight transmit and two analog-to-digital receive channels. Fresnel beamforming was found to perform comparably to conventional delay-and-sum beamforming. However, the performance of Fresnel beamforming is highly dependent on focal errors. These focal errors result in high side-lobe levels and further reduce the performance of Fresnel beamforming in the presence of phase aberration. With the advantages of lower side-lobe levels and suppression of aberration effects, harmonic imaging offers an effective solution to the limitations of Fresnel beamforming. We describe the implementation of tissue harmonic imaging and pulse inversion harmonic imaging in Fresnel beamforming, followed by dual apodization with cross-correlation, to improve image quality. Compared with conventional delay-and-sum beamforming, experimental results indicated contrast-to-noise ratio improvements of 10%, 49% and 264% for Fresnel beamforming using tissue harmonic imaging in the cases of no aberrator, 5-mm pork aberrator and 12-mm pork aberrator, respectively. These improvements were 22%, 57% and 352% for Fresnel beamforming using pulse inversion harmonic imaging. Moreover, dual apodization with cross-correlation was found to further improve the contrast-to-noise ratios in all cases. Harmonic imaging was also found to narrow the lateral beamwidth and shorten the axial pulse length by at least 25% and 21%, respectively, for Fresnel beamforming at different aberration levels. These results suggest the effectiveness of harmonic imaging in improving image quality for Fresnel beamforming, especially in the presence of phase aberration. Even though this combination of Fresnel beamforming and harmonic imaging does not outperform delay-and-sum beamforming combined with harmonic imaging, it provides the benefits of reduced channel count and potentially reduced cost and size of ultrasound systems.