Optimization of Transmission Parameters in Fast Pulse-Echo Ultrasound Imaging Using Sparse Recovery

In pulse-echo ultrasound imaging, the goal is to achieve a certain image quality while minimizing the duration of the signal acquisition. In the past, fast ultrasound imaging methods applying sparse signal recovery have been implemented by accepting a single pulse-echo measurement. However, they have experienced a certain amount of reconstruction error. In sparse signal recovery, reducing the correlation between the samples of the measurements observed by the different receivers is beneficial for lowering the reconstruction error. Exploiting the Born approximation and Green's function for the wave equation, the analytical inverse scattering problem can be defined in matrix-vector form. Adopting this setting, it has been suggested in the past to reduce the correlation between the samples of the measurement using Cylindrical Waves (CWs) with randomly selected delays and weights. In a similar setting, we created an optimization problem accepting transmission delays and weights as variables to minimize the correlation between the samples of the measurement in each receiver. We demonstrate via simulations that CWs employing the optimized transmission parameters outperformed the cases with Plane Wave Imaging (PWI) and CWs with random transmission parameters in terms of reconstruction accuracy.