Ultrasonics
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The concept of high frame rate ultrasound imaging (typically greater than 1000 frames per second) has inspired new fields of clinical applications for ultrasound imaging such as fast cardiovascular imaging, fast Doppler imaging and real-time 3D imaging. Coherent plane-wave compounding is a promising beamforming technique to achieve high frame rate imaging. By combining echoes from plane waves with different angles, dynamic transmit focusing is efficiently accomplished at all points in the image field. ⋯ The image quality of different beamforming methods was quantified in terms of contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR). Our results show that the new SMF based plane-wave compounding method provides better contrast than DAS based compounding method. Also CSMF can obtain a similar contrast level to dynamic transmit-receive focusing with only 21 transmit events.