Computationally efficient super resolution ultrasound imaging based on multiple transmission/reception with different carrier frequencies

We have previously proposed super-resolution ultrasound imaging based on multiple transmission/reception (TR) with different carrier frequencies called SCM (Super-resolution FM-Chirp Correlation Method). In this method, since a focused beam is transmitted, multiple TRs are required for each line constituting a B-mode image. In order to reduce the number of required TRs, the SCM has been extended to the synthetic aperture (SA) version called SA-SCM. In this version, only one set of TRs is executed for each image. However, further reduction is required for real-time imaging. Therefore, in this study, we propose a new method called SCM-weighted SA, which switches the order of the SCM and reception beam former (RBF) in the SA-SCM and further use the SCM results as a weight for RBF. The number of TRs is the same as the SA-SCM, but in the SCM-weighted SA, only one RBF is required for each image. In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness of our new method by FEM simulation and experiment. From the results, i...