Ultrasound Plane-Wave Imaging Based on Linear Arrays with Variable Inter-element Spacings

For ultrasound plane wave imaging, the conventional ultrasonic transducer is a uniform linear array. However, the fan-shaped artifacts which usually appear around the target point in the ultrasound image affect the observation and analysis of the image. It is one of the import issues that many researchers are trying to solve using improved plane-wave algorithms. In fact, similar issue had been studied in the field of radio antenna about linear arrays with variable inter-element spacing. In order to apply this structural design in ultrasound transducer with an expectation to improve the image quality of coherent compounding plane-wave imaging, simulation about several nonuniformities have been finished. The simulation results demonstrated that the special structural design can generate flatter wave fronts of transmitted waveforms at near field, which contributes to improving the image quality of plane wave imaging.