Ultrafast Endoscopic Ultrasonography With Circular Array

Rapid development of ultrafast ultrasound imaging has led to novel medical ultrasound applications, including shear wave elastography and super-resolution vascular imaging. However, these have yet to incorporate endoscopic ultrasonography (EUS) with a circular array, which provides a wider view in the alimentary canal than traditional linear and convex arrays. A coherent diverging wave compounding (CDWC) imaging method was proposed for ultrafast EUS imaging and implemented on a custom circular array. In CDWC, virtual acoustic point sources are allocated and virtually insonified diverging waves from each source are achieved by adjusting all circular array elements’ emission time delays. Diverging waves emitted from different virtual sources are coherently compounded, generating synthetic transmit focusing at every location in the image plane. As the field of view of the circular array is centrally symmetric, all virtual sources are equidistantly distributed on a concentric circle of radius <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${r}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. To achieve the highest frame rate possible with image quality comparable to that obtained with the traditional multi-focus imaging method, the effects of various radii <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${r}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and virtual source quantities on the compounded image quality were theoretically analyzed and experimentally verified. Simulation, phantom, and <italic>ex-vivo</italic> experiments were conducted with an 8 MHz, 124-element circular array, with a 5.35 mm radius. When 16 virtual sources were used with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${r}=1.605$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mm, image quality comparable to that obtained with the multi-focus approach was achieved at a frame rate of 1000 frames/s. This demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed ultrafast EUS imaging method and promotes further development of multi-functional EUS devices.