Joint reconstruction of compressively sensed ultrasound RF echoes by exploiting temporal correlations

In this paper, the principles of compressive sensing are exploited for the joint reconstruction of an ensemble of biomedical ultrasound RF echoes, using a highly reduced set of random measurements. Temporal correlations between the distinct RF echoes are taken into account during the reconstruction, which results in a reduction of the required number of measurements, while also increasing the reconstruction quality. The efficiency of recent state-of-the-art methods is evaluated on a set of real ultrasound data, to highlight the importance of accounting for temporal correlations during reconstruction. Our experimental evaluation reveals an improved performance, both visually and in terms of quality metrics, such as the SSIM and PSNR, when such correlations are extracted during the joint reconstruction of RF echoes, compared with previous methods based on the separate recovery of each RF echo.