Quantitative assessment of effects of phase aberration and noise on high-frame-rate imaging.

The goal of this paper is to quantitatively study effects of phase aberration and noise on high-frame-rate (HFR) imaging using a set of traditional and new parameters. These parameters include the traditional -6-dB lateral resolution, and new parameters called the energy ratio (ER) and the sidelobe ratio (SR). ER is the ratio between the total energy of sidelobe and the total energy of mainlobe of a point spread function (PSF) of an imaging system. SR is the ratio between the peak value of the sidelobe and the peak value of the mainlobe of the PSF. In the paper, both simulation and experiment are conducted for a quantitative assessment and comparison of the effects of phase aberration and noise on the HFR and the conventional delay-and-sum (D&S) imaging methods with the set of parameters. In the HFR imaging method, steered plane waves (SPWs) and limited-diffraction beams (LDBs) are used in transmission, and received signals are processed with the Fast Fourier Transform to reconstruct images. In the D&S imaging method, beams focused at a fixed depth are used in transmission and dynamically focused beams are used in reception for image reconstruction. The simulation results show that the average differences between the -6-dB lateral beam widths of the HFR imaging and the D&S imaging methods are -0.1337mm for SPW and -0.1481mm for LDB, which means that the HFR imaging method has a higher lateral image resolution than the D&S imaging method since the values are negative. In experiments, the average differences are also negative, i.e., -0.2804mm for SPW and -0.3365mm for LDB. The results for the changes of ER and SR between the HFR and the D&S imaging methods have negative values, too. After introducing phase aberration and noise, both simulations and experiments show that the HFR imaging method has also less change in the -6-dB lateral resolution, ER, and SR as compared to the conventional D&S imaging method. This means that the HFR imaging method is less sensitive to the phase aberration and noise. Based on the study of the new parameters on the HFR and the D&S imaging methods, it is expected that the new parameters can also be applied to assess quality of other imaging methods.