Department of Information Engineering, University of Florence, Firenze, Italy.
Univ Lyon, INSA-Lyon, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, UJM-Saint Etienne, CNRS, Inserm, CREATIS UMR 5220, U1206 F-69621, Lyon, France.
Sci Rep. 2018 Jun 14;8(1):9108. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-27490-2.
Three dimensional ultrasound (3-D US) imaging methods based on 2-D array probes are increasingly investigated. However, the experimental test of new 3-D US approaches is contrasted by the need of controlling very large numbers of probe elements. Although this problem may be overcome by the use of 2-D sparse arrays, just a few experimental results have so far corroborated the validity of this approach. In this paper, we experimentally compare the performance of a fully wired 1024-element (32 × 32) array, assumed as reference, to that of a 256-element random and of an "optimized" 2-D sparse array, in both focused and compounded diverging wave (DW) transmission modes. The experimental results in 3-D focused mode show that the resolution and contrast produced by the optimized sparse array are close to those of the full array while using 25% of elements. Furthermore, the experimental results in 3-D DW mode and 3-D focused mode are also compared for the first time and they show that both the contrast and the resolution performance are higher when using the 3-D DW at volume rates up to 90/second which represent a 36x speed up factor compared to the focused mode.
基于二维（2-D）阵列探头的三维（3-D）超声（US）成像方法越来越受到关注。然而，新的 3-D US 方法的实验测试受到需要控制大量探头元件的限制。尽管使用 2-D 稀疏阵列可以克服这个问题，但到目前为止，只有少数实验结果证实了这种方法的有效性。在本文中，我们在聚焦和复合发散波（DW）传输模式下，实验比较了一个全布线的 1024 个元件（32×32）的阵列的性能，该阵列被视为参考，与一个 256 个元件的随机阵列和一个“优化”的 2-D 稀疏阵列的性能进行比较。在 3-D 聚焦模式下的实验结果表明，优化的稀疏阵列产生的分辨率和对比度与全阵列相当，而使用的元件数量仅为 25%。此外，3-D DW 模式和 3-D 聚焦模式的实验结果也首次进行了比较，结果表明，在体积率高达 90/秒的情况下使用 3-D DW 时，对比度和分辨率性能更高，与聚焦模式相比，速度提高了 36 倍。
