Plane-wave imaging using synthetic aperture imaging reconstruction technique with regularized singular-value decomposition (RSVD)

Plane wave ultrasound imaging (PW) with coherent compounding can improve the image quality in terms of contrast, SNR, and lateral resolution compared to the conventional PW method. When the number of PW transmissions is small, the image quality still need improvement. In this paper, we proposed to first estimate the synthetic transmit aperture imaging (STA) data with regularized singular-value decomposition (RSVD) from the PW RF data, and then used the STA reconstruction method to reconstruct ultrasound images. Compared to the delay-and-sum, the contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) values of the hypo-echoic inclusions in both simulation and experiment was improved approximately by 28% and 19%, respectively, while the spatial resolutions were similar in the proposed method. The objects at the central column in the field of view have image metrics comparable to those of the full data set (75 PW emissions).