Comparison and evaluation of classical and modern beamforming

Modern hardware components like FPGAs and GPUs allow the massive parallelization of signal processing algorithms. The classical beamforming approach though provides limited possibilities for parallelization. For the development of a new ultrasound research platform it is examined what beamforming approach is most suited for new ultrasound imaging modalities. Synthetic aperture methods, plane wave imaging and the classical line-by-line beamforming approach are compared regarding time efficiency and imaging performance using simulations. The plane wave approach turned out to be the most versatile and superior beamforming method to generate homogenously focused images with high resolution and acceptable contrast at a very high frame rate.