Novel Transmit Aperture for Very Large Depth of Focus in Medical Ultrasound B-scan

Obtaining high quality ultrasound images at high frame rates has great medical importance, especially in applications in which tissue motion is significant (e.g., the beating heart). Dynamic focus and dynamic aperture can improve image quality significantly, and they have been implemented on the receive beam in state-of-the-art medical ultrasound systems. However, implementing dynamic focus and dynamic aperture on the transmit beam compromises frame rate. We introduce a novel sinc squared-argument transmit aperture that is obtained by coherently integrating the quadratic phase change over a continuum of focal points. Thus uniform sensitivity and uniform point spread function can be achieved over a very large depth without reducing the frame rate. Numerical simulations validate our theoretical analysis and demonstrate significant promises of the new technique.