Optimized transmission design through mutual coherence minimization in ultrafast pulse-echo ultrasound imaging employing sparse recovery

In ultrasound pulse-echo imaging, there is a trade-off between acquisition time and reconstruction accuracy. Although the minimum acquisition time in pulse-echo ultrasound imaging, which is by transmitting and receiving all samples from all transducer elements only one time, is achieved, the reconstruction accuracy still need to be improved. Since the common approach with these methods is to assume point scatterers in the measurement area, sparse signal recovery techniques can be exploited by adjusting the forward model in the form of matrix-sparse vector multiplication. In sparse signal recovery problems, coherence of the dictionary matrix is the essential factor for reconstruction accuracy. Therefore, in this work, we created an optimization algorithm, which minimizes the correlation between distinct samples of the received signals in each transducer by using the transmission amplitudes and delays as optimization variables. The reconstruction accuracy results outperform conventional plane wave imaging and state-of-the art implementation with randomly chosen transmission amplitudes and delays.