An optimized plane wave synthetic focusing imaging for high-resolution convex array imaging

High quality ultrasound imaging is required throughout entire imaging depths for abdominal ultrasound. In general, sector scanning with a convex array transducer is performed by using a focused ultrasound beam to obtain a wide field-of-view. However, the conventional focusing (CF) method suffers from the degraded spatial resolution except for the vicinity of the focal depth due to the diffractive propagation of the focused ultrasound. Plane wave synthetic focusing (PWSF) method has been initially proposed for a linear array transducer to give a solution to the diffraction problem of interrogating beam. In this paper, to our best knowledge, we present the first report on the PWSF method for B-mode convex array imaging as well as the optimization strategies for enhancing image quality. The validation study was performed by acquiring data from a tissue-mimicking phantom (040GSE, CIRS Inc., USA) using an ultrasonic research platform (Vantage 128, Verasonics Inc., USA) with a C5-2 convex array transducer. The evaluation results indicate that the PWSF method can be successfully employed to convex array imaging and it exhibits substantially improved image quality compared to that of CF method.