Fast image acquisition in pulse-echo ultrasound imaging using compressed sensing

In this contribution we refined our previously introduced concept for pulse-echo ultrasound imaging based on compressed sensing (CS). Our goal was to reduce the number of sequential wave emissions per image and thus acquisition time, without diminishing image quality. Using measurement data obtained from a wire phantom (A) and a multi-tissue phantom (B), we evaluated our concept in comparison to B-mode, synthetic aperture focussing, delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming, and filtered backpropagation (FBP). Emitting only a single plane wave, our CS approach yielded the best results for the sparse phantom A in terms of sidelobe reduction and lateral -6 dBwidths. For the non-sparse phantom B, CS yielded a higher contrast than DAS and FBP when a single plane wave was emitted and a curvelet or wavelet transform was used for sparse representation. The contrast was comparable to SA and B-mode.