Adaptive beamforming with coded excitation in ultrasound imaging

Nowadays the main problems of ultrasound imaging (USI) are the quality of the image (in terms of signal-to-noise ratio and resolution) and the duration of data acquisition. For solving these challenges, multiple methods were studied during the last decade. It was shown that through the transmission of coded excitation pulses to the ultrasound probe, we can obtain an enhancement of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Different methods of beamforming of the back-scattered echoes appeared last years, both in time and spatial domain. These methods improve the lateral resolution. In this paper, we describe an original solution which combines the adaptive beamforming in time domain with the coded excitation. The final ultrasound images will gain in both lateral resolution and SNR.