Fast wavenumber-domain reconstruction for 3-D plane wave imaging with row-column addressed arrays
Xu Gu1, Mu Chen1, Letian Gan2
1State Key Laboratory of Fluid Power and Mechatronic Systems, School of Mechanical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China; Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Advanced Equipment Manufacturing and Measurement Technology, School of Mechanical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China.
None:
Ultrasonic row-column addressed (RCA) arrays enable volumetric imaging with reduced channel count while maintaining a large aperture. With full matrix capturing (FMC) data and total focusing method (TFM) reconstruction, RCA probes can deliver image quality comparable to that of fully addressed 2-D arrays. However, the large number of transmit-receive events required for FMC-TFM severely limit the achievable volume rate, and even with reduced transmissions in plane wave imaging (PWI), conventional delay-and-sum (DAS) beamformer remains computationally inefficient for large 3-D voxel grids. To overcome these problems, an efficient wavenumber-domain algorithm for 3-D PWI with RCA arrays is proposed in this paper. The forward model for RCA PWI acquisition is derived, and the inverse Stolt mapping is established. By treating the transmit angle as an explicit dimension, the measurement-domain spectrum is completed. Two orthogonal image volumes are then reconstructed and coherently combined using a conjugate cross-correlation to suppress sidelobes and improve signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Moreover, the calculation in wavenumber-domain dramatically reduces the computational cost. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs better in terms of imaging quality and efficiency. Specifically, it achieves an acceleration factor of approximately 231-fold over the DAS method for a volume of 256 × 256 × 512 voxels, indicating strong potential for real-time volumetric ultrasound imaging in practical applications.
