Performance of Synthetic Aperture Compounding for in-vivo imaging

A method for synthetic aperture compounding (SAC) is applied to data from water tank measurements, data from a tissue-mimicking phantom, and clinical data from the abdomen of a healthy 27 year old male. Further, using this method compounding can be obtained without any loss in temporal resolution. The water tank measurements reveal an improved detail resolution of 45% when comparing SAC to conventional compounding and an improvement of 22%, when comparing to synthetic aperture (SA) imaging.

The cystic resolution at 12 dB is improved by 50% and 12% when comparing SAC to conventional compounding and SA imaging respectively. The tissue phantom measurements show a 3.2 dB improvement of the normalized information density (NID) when comparing images formed using SAC to conventional compound images and an improvement of 2 dB for a comparison between SAC imaging and SA imaging.

For the clinical images, contrast ratios (CR) are computed between regions in the portal and hepatic veins and the surrounding tissue. An average improvement of 15% is obtained when comparing SAC images to SA images without compounding.