Blind-label subwavelength ultrasound imaging

Abstract

There is a long-existing trade-off between the imaging resolution and penetration depth in acoustic imaging caused by the diffraction limit. Most existing approaches addressing this trade-off require controlled “labels,” i.e., metamaterials or contrast agents, to be deposited close to the objects and to either remain static or be tracked precisely during imaging. We propose a “blind-label” approach for acoustic subwavelength imaging. The blind labels are randomly distributed acoustic scatterers with deep-subwavelength sizes whose exact locations and trajectories are not necessary information in image reconstruction. The proposed method achieves the resolution of 0.24 wavelengths in ultrasound imaging experiments and 0.2 wavelengths in simulations, providing over 10 times improvement compared to the diffraction limit. We also elucidate the influence of scatterer size and concentration on imaging performance. The proposed “blind-label” approach relaxes the restrictions of existing acoustic subwavelength imaging technologies relying on controlled labels, therefore substantially improving the practicality of acoustic subwavelength imaging in biomedical ultrasound imaging, sonar, and nondestructive testing.