Ultrasound Fourier slice imaging: a novel approach for ultrafast imaging technique

Ultrafast imaging based on plane-wave (PW) has become an intense area of research thanks to its capability of reaching frame rate higher than a thousand of frames per second. Several proposed approaches are based on Fourier-domain reconstruction. In these techniques, the Fourier transform of the received echoes is projected to the k-space corresponding to the Fourier transform of the object function. For one emitted PW, N lines along the kz axis direction are reconstructed in the k-space. We propose in this study a new acquisition scheme which allows acquiring the non-null part of the ultrasound spectrum with finer resolution. We show that this strategy allows obtaining images with slightly better lateral resolution and higher contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) when compared to other Fourier-based techniques.