Feasibility of Multiplane-Transmit Beamforming for Real-Time Volumetric Cardiac Imaging: A Simulation Study

Today's 3-D cardiac ultrasound imaging systems suffer from relatively low spatial and temporal resolution, limiting their applicability in daily clinical practice. To address this problem, 3-D diverging wave imaging with spatial coherent compounding (DWC) as well as 3-D multiline-transmit (MLT) imaging have recently been proposed. Currently, the former improves the temporal resolution significantly at the expense of image quality and the risk of introducing motion artifacts, whereas the latter only provides a moderate gain in volume rate but mostly preserves quality. In this paper, a new technique for real-time volumetric cardiac imaging is proposed by combining the strengths of both approaches. Hereto, multiple planar (i.e., 2-D) diverging waves are simultaneously transmitted in order to scan the 3-D volume, i.e., multiplane transmit (MPT) beamforming. The performance of a 3MPT imaging system was contrasted to that of a 3-D DWC system and that of a 3-D MLT system by computer simulations during both static and moving conditions of the target structures while operating at similar volume rate. It was demonstrated that for stationary targets, the 3MPT imaging system was competitive with both the 3-D DWC and 3-D MLT systems in terms of spatial resolution and sidelobe levels (i.e., image quality). However, for moving targets, the image quality quickly deteriorated for the 3-D DWC systems while it remained stable for the 3MPT system while operating at twice the volume rate of the 3-D-MLT system. The proposed MPT beamforming approach was thus demonstrated to be feasible and competitive to state-of-the-art methodologies.