Error analysis of subaperture processing in 1-D ultrasound arrays

To simplify the medical ultrasound system and reduce the cost, several techniques have been proposed to reduce the interconnections between the ultrasound probe and the back-end console. Among them, subaperture processing (SAP) is the most straightforward approach and is widely used in commercial products. This paper reviews the most important error sources of SAP, such as static focusing, delay quantization, linear delay profile, and coarse apodization, and the impacts introduced by these errors are shown. We propose to use main lobe coherence loss as a simple classification of the quality of the beam profile for a given design. This figure-ofmerit (FoM) is evaluated by simulations with a 1-D ultrasound subaperture array setup. The analytical expressions and the coherence loss can work as a quick guideline in subaperture design by equalizing the merit degradations from different error sources, as well as minimizing the average or maximum loss over ranges. For the evaluated 1-D array example, a good balance between errors and cost was achieved using a subaperture size of 5 elements, focus at 40 mm range, and a delay quantization step corresponding to a phase of π/4.