Compressed Ultrasound Signal Reconstruction Using a Low-Rank and Joint-Sparse Representation Model

With the introduction of very dense sensor arrays in ultrasound (US) imaging, data transfer rate and data storage can become a bottleneck in US system design. To reduce the amount of sampled channel data, we propose a new approach based on the low-rank and joint-sparse model that allows us to exploit the correlations between different US channels and transmissions. With this method, the minimum number of measurements at each channel can be lower than the sparsity in compressive sensing theory. The accuracy of the reconstruction is less dependent on the sparse basis. An optimization algorithm based on the simultaneous direction method of multipliers is proposed to efficiently solve the resulting optimization problem. Results on different data sets with different experimental settings show that the proposed method is better adapted to the US signals and can recover the image with fewer samples (e.g., 10% of the samples) than the existing compressive sensing-based methods, while maintaining reasonable image quality.