title: Using redundancy of round-trip ultrasound signal for non-continuous arrays: Application to gap and blockage compensation.
abstract: In ultrasound imaging, an array of elements is used to image a medium. If part of the array is blocked by an obstacle, or if the array is made from several sub-arrays separated by a gap, grating lobes appear and the image is degraded. The grating lobes are caused by missing spatial frequencies, corresponding to the blocked or non-existing elements. However, in an active imaging system, where elements are used both for transmitting and receiving, the round trip signal is redundant: different pairs of transmit and receive elements carry similar information. It is shown here that, if the gaps are smaller than the active sub-apertures, this redundancy can be used to compensate for the missing signals and recover full resolution. Three algorithms are proposed: one is based on a synthetic aperture method, a second one uses dual-apodization beamforming, and the third one is a radio frequency (RF) data based deconvolution. The algorithms are evaluated on simulated and experimental data sets. An application could be imaging through ribs with a large aperture.
authors.affiliation: Philips Research North America, 345 Scarborough Road, Briarcliff Manor, New York 10510, USA.
authors.forename: Jean-Luc
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Robert
authors.affiliation: Philips Research North America, 345 Scarborough Road, Briarcliff Manor, New York 10510, USA.
authors.forename: Ramon
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Erkamp
authors.affiliation: Philips Research North America, 345 Scarborough Road, Briarcliff Manor, New York 10510, USA.
authors.forename: Sanghamithra
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Korukonda
authors.affiliation: Philips Research North America, 345 Scarborough Road, Briarcliff Manor, New York 10510, USA.
authors.forename: François
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Vignon
authors.affiliation: Philips Research North America, 345 Scarborough Road, Briarcliff Manor, New York 10510, USA.
authors.forename: Emil
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Radulescu