A method for synthetic aperture compounding

An approach to perform ultrasound spatial compounding using synthetic aperture data is proposed. The approach allows compounding to be performed for any number of directions without reducing the frame rate or temporal resolution. It is demonstrated how the contrast is improved by compounding and the effect is quantized by speckle statistics and by computing contrast-to-noise ratios (CNR) from the resulting images. The method is validated using Field II simulations for a 7 MHz, λ/2-pitch transducer with 192 elements with 64 elements active for each scan line. Circular regions (cysts) with a diameter of 5 mm and scattering levels ranging from -3 to -12 dB relative to the background are imaged at 2 depths. Compound images composed of 1-5 images with an angular separation of 2 degrees are constructed and for the cysts at -3, -6, -9, and -12 dB, a CNR of -0.43, -1.11, -1.44, and -1.91 dB are obtained when using 5 images. Using the same RF data, a synthetic aperture image without compounding reveals a CNR of -0.36, -0.93, -1.23, and -1.61 dB for the four cysts, respectively.