Enhanced Contrast Thinned Array Echocardiography

The demand for higher resolutions of 2D/3D ultrasound images requires an increasing number of elements in the transducer, thus driving up the data flow from the front-end CPU, the data channels’ maximal bandwidth, and cost. Radar designers have faced similar challenges and have used multiplicative beamforming for the construction of thinned antenna arrays. Accordingly, through nonlinear multiplicative processing one can approximate the gain of a uniformly spread ultrasound array by multiplying and then filtering two sub-arrays of elements: one consisting of a short filled array of elements and a centered-aligned thinned array. The reduction in the number of elements allows computationally demanding signal processing algorithms that would have been far more challenging for larger arrays. Our tests show for example that two sub-arrays amounting to 13 elements, 7 closely spaced and 6 elements of a thinned array, together with signal processing techniques, produce better results than an unprocessed 64 elements array, thus achieving improved medical imaging.