Compressed Sensing Approach for Reducing the Number of Receive Elements in Synthetic Transmit Aperture Imaging

Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in ultrasound imaging methods alternate to conventional focused beamforming (CFB). One such approach is based on the synthetic aperture (SA) scheme; more popular are the ones based on synthetic transmit aperture (STA) schemes with a single-element transmit or multielement STA (MSTA). However, one of the main challenges in translating such methods to low-cost ultrasound systems is the tradeoffs among image quality, frame rate, and complexity of the system. These schemes use all the transducer elements during receive, which dictates a corresponding number of parallel receive channels, thus increasing the complexity of the system. A considerable amount of literature has been published on compressed sensing (CS) for SA imaging. Such studies are aimed at reducing the number of transmissions in SA but still recover images of acceptable quality at high frame rate and fail to address the complexity due to full-aperture receive. In this work, we adopt a CS framework to MSTA, with a motivation to reduce the number of receive elements and data. The CS recovery performance was assessed for the simulation data, tissue-mimicking phantom data, and an example in vivo biceps data. It was found that in spite of using 50% receive elements and overall using only 12.5% of the data, the images recovered using CS were comparable to those of reference full-aperture case in terms of estimated lateral resolution, contrast-to-noise ratio, and structural similarity indices. Thus, the proposed CS framework provides some fresh insights into translating the MSTA imaging method to affordable ultrasound scanners.