Improving Range Resolution in Near-Field Ultrasound Beamforming

The design of beamformer is a critical component in the development of ultrasound imaging. Conventional delay-and-sum beamformer is intuitive and easy to implement, however the range resolution is limited by the pulse bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a technique that optimizes the reconstruction kernel to approximate an ideal impulse, while also controlling the mainlobe/sidelobe tradeoff. Preliminary simulation has demonstrated that the new method achieves significantly better range resolution than simple delay-and-sum beamformers for medium bandwidth near-field imaging.