Acquisition and Processing of V-wave Ultrasound Beams for Fast Frame Rate

Novel ultrasound beams are collected with a design of transmission pattern of a transducer whose elements are arranged in a linear or curved array. We call them V-wave beams. In this design half of the elements on the transducer are used to transmit a local coherent wave in one inward direction and the other half of elements are used to transmit another local coherent wave in a conjugate direction. The two propagation directions are opposing each other and are symmetric with respect to the normal to the transducer at the center. Transmitters at both edges are fired earlier than the one at the center, with a time slope a function of the flex-angle α (measured with respect to the array). Compared to planewave data only half the number of beams is required in V-wave data acquisition to achieve comparable image quality and resolution at the center of an image domain, effectively doubling the frame rate. This is particularly useful for applications in which ultrafast frame rate is required and only the center part of the image domain is of interest.