Preliminary result of spiral synthetic aperture based ultrasound computed tomography

The ultrasound computed tomography system based on the ring probe adopts sequential single-slice scanning mode. The ring probe keeps stationary when the scan is in process; after the signals of one slice are captured, the ring probe steps along the elevation axis to scan the next slice. The scanning process needs to step and stop repeatedly, and the scanning time is relatively long. Also, the lack of signals between tomographic image slices may result in missed diagnosis. This paper proposes a new spiral synthetic aperture method for ultrasound tomographic volume imaging. The ring probe moves along the elevation axis at a certain speed, while the transmitting and receiving array elements are switched electronically. Therefore, “spiral” transmitting aperture and receiving aperture are formed, and continuous three-dimensional spatial spiral data are collected to directly reconstruct the three-dimensional volume image. Preliminary experimental result shows that this method can shorten the scanning time and improve image quality in the elevation direction.