Compensating the combined effects of absorption and dispersion in plane wave pulse-echo ultrasound imaging using sparse recovery

We extended our concept for fast image acquisition in pulse-echo ultrasound imaging based on sparse recovery (SR) to compensate for the combined effects of absorption and dispersion. Using measurement data obtained from a multi-tissue phantom (A) and a human thyroid (B, in vivo), we demonstrated that image quality can be significantly improved by this extension. Emitting only two steered plane waves, our extended SR-based concept outperformed synthetic aperture (SA) imaging (128 wave emissions), delay-and-sum beamforming (11 wave emissions), and minimum variance beamforming (11 wave emissions) in terms of contrast for object A. Lateral -6 dB-widths were similar to SA. For object B, SR improved the visibility of anatomical contours in contrast to the algorithms used for comparison.