Wide Field-of-View Plane Wave Ultrasound Imaging based on Linear Array Sub-apertures and Adaptive Weighting Technique

Coherent plane-wave compounding (CPWC) could achieve a high image quality by the coherent summation of plane wave (PW) imaging at different tilted transmission angles. However, CPWC has a drawback of the limited imaging region. This study aims to realize a wide field-of-view (FOV) ultrasound PW imaging with high quality based on the linear array. We propose a wide field-of-view imaging method using subapertures to transmit plane waves, which simulate the divergence of plane waves in the far field based on virtual sources. An adaptive weighting factor named signal complexity factor is further proposed to suppress sidelobes and improve the resolution and contrast for the whole FOV based on the fuzzy entropy of echo signals. Simulated results show the proposed method can provide extended FOV, and improved resolution and contrast were obtained by the adaptive weighting method compared with CPWC.