Dual stage beamforming in the absence of front-end receive focusing

Ultrasound front-end receive designs for miniature, wireless, and/or matrix transducers can be simplified considerably by direct-element summation in receive. In this paper we develop a dual-stage beamforming technique that is able to produce a high-quality image from scanlines that are produced with focused transmit, and simple summation in receive (no delays). We call this non-delayed sequential beamforming (NDSB). In the first stage, low-resolution RF scanlines are formed by simple summation of element signals from a running sub-aperture. In the second stage, delay-and-sum beamforming is performed in which the delays are calculated considering the transmit focal points as virtual sources emitting spherical waves, and the sub-apertures as large unfocused receive elements. The NDSB method is validated with simulations in Field II. For experimental validation, RF channel data were acquired with a commercial research scanner using a 5 MHz linear array, and were subsequently proce...

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