Enhancing Diverging-Wave Ultrasound Imaging with the Iterative Adaptive Approach

Diverging-wave transmission is a technique used to enhance temporal resolution, but this comes with inherent limitations in terms of image quality. To address these, various specialized and adaptive beamforming methods have been proposed. In the current study, we demonstrate the feasibility of applying the Iterative Adaptive beamforming Approach (IAA) to coherently compounded diverging-wave transmission data – hence mimicking the previously demonstrated focused-transmit setting. This is done on both synthetic simulated and recorded phantom data. The results demonstrate that the proposed method offers comparable contrast and significantly better resolution than the delay-and-sum (DAS) beamformer applied to the same dataset. Moreover, we demonstrate that the IAA method is also applicable to single-transmit diverging waves. Although this setting is quite different from the original IAA regime, the method produces images of similar or better quality than DAS.