Compressed sensing for high frame rate, high resolution and high contrast ultrasound imaging.

Compressed sensing (CS) or compressive sampling allows much lower sampling frequency than the Nyquist sampling frequency. In this paper, we propose a novel technique, named compressed sensing based synthetic transmit aperture (CS-STA), to speed up the acquisition of ultrasound imaging. Ultrasound transducer transmits plane wave with random apodizations for several times and receives the corresponding echoes. The full dataset of STA is then recovered from the recorded echoes using a CS reconstruction algorithm. Finally, a standard STA beamforming is performed on the dataset to form a B-mode image. When the number of CS-STA firings is smaller than the number of STA firings, higher frame rate is achieved. In addition, CS-STA maintains the high resolution of STA because of the CS recovered full dataset of STA, and improves the contrast due to plane wave firings. Computer simulations and phantom experiments are carried out to investigate the feasibility and performance of the proposed CS-STA method. The CS-STA method is proven to be capable of obtaining simultaneously high frame rate, high solution and high contrast ultrasound imaging.