High Contrast and High Frame Rate Coherent Plane Wave Compounding by Means of 2D Spatio-Angular Interpolation Technique

To address the low image quality issue in plane wave imaging (PWI), coherent plane-wave compounding (CPWC) was developed based on PWI along multiple directions followed by a coherent combination of the beamformed images. The main challenge with this approach is that there is a trade-off between image quality and frame rate which depends on how many angles are used in CPWC. Our primary goal here is to improve this trade-off by decreasing the number of angles required for image reconstruction. Here, we propose a sparse CPWC using a robust transmission coding pattern (TCP) followed by applying 2D spatio-angular interpolation. This idea allows us to improve the frame rate while preserving the image quality. We apply our proposed technique to the plane wave imaging challenge in the medical ultrasound (PICMUS) database. Results show that we can achieve a 3-fold frame rate improvement while preserving image quality.