Full-Matrix Phase Shift Migration Method for Transcranial Ultrasonic Imaging

A spectrum-domain method, called full-matrix phase shift migration (FM-PSM), is presented for transcranial ultrasound phase correction and imaging with ideal synthetic aperture focusing technology. The simulated data obtained using the pseudospectral time-domain method are used to evaluate the feasibility of the method. The experimental data measured from a 3-D printed skull phantom are used to evaluate the algorithm performance in terms of resolution, contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), and eccentricity comparing with the classical ray-tracing delay and sum (DAS) method. In wire imaging experiment, FM-PSM has a lateral resolution of 0.22 mm and ray-tracing DAS has a lateral resolution of 0.24 mm measured at -6-dB drop using a transducer with a center frequency of 6.25 MHz. In cylinder imaging experiment, FM-PSM has a CNR of 2.14 and ray-tracing DAS has a CNR of 1.82, which illustrates about 17% improvement. For a J -element array and an output image with pixels M ×N (lateral × axial), the computational cost of the DAS is of O(J ×M²×N²) ; on the contrary, it reduces to O(J ×M ×N²) with the proposed FM-PSM. The results suggest that FM-PSM is an efficiency method for transcranial ultrasonic imaging.