Compressed sensing for fast image acquisition in pulse-echo ultrasound

Abstract

We propose a concept for fast image acquisition in diagnostic ultrasound imaging using compressed sensing (CS). Our concept is based on the formulation of an inverse scattering problem (ISP) to recover deviations in compressibility in a specified region from measurements of the scattered sound. For its derivation, we utilize the Born approximation and assume the emission of a single broadband plane sound wave. We employ CS to regularize this ill-posed ISP, assuming the existence of a sparse representation of the deviations in compressibility in a suitable basis or tight frame. We validate our concept experimentally and compare the recovered images to those generated by synthetic aperture (SA; 128 wave emissions), filtered backpropagation (FBP; single plane wave emission), and delay-and-sum (DAS; single plane wave emission) algorithms. For a sparse wire phantom, our concept outperformed SA, FBP and DAS in terms of sidelobe reduction and lateral -6 dB-widths. Axial -6 dB-widths were comparable. Using wave atoms or curvelets for sparse representation, our concept recovered a commercial multi-tissue phantom with fewer image artifacts and smaller lateral -6 dB-widths than FBP and DAS. Moreover, the achieved contrast was comparable to SA. © 2012 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston.