Simplified Delay-And-Sum implementation for plane wave ultrasound imaging

The use of ultrasound plane wave imaging (PWI) technology is particularly suited to applications that require high frame rates, making it an optimal choice for real-time dynamic monitoring and large-scale tissue imaging. In this field, the Delay-and-Sum (DAS) algorithm represents a fundamental component of digital beamforming techniques. It is renowned for its simplicity of implementation and efficiency, and is therefore widely employed in plane wave imaging. This perspective article introduces an innovative method that approximates DAS by employing straightforward coordinate transformations, achieving imaging results comparable to those of traditional DAS while significantly reducing the computational resources required for spatial alignment delays in beamforming. The results of the imaging experiment, which employed the Plane-Wave Imaging Challenge in Medical Ultrasound (PICMUS) dataset demonstrate that our approach, while maintaining the same time complexity as the original DAS method, necessitates only a 2/N<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">e</inf> fraction of the spatial complexity.