Introduction to ultrasound holographic Q-imaging

A simple and high resolution circular-array holographic imaging method is introduced in this paper. Using the back-propagation principle of holography, a circular-array system is treated as a distorted linear-array system and the differences are treated as the so-called wavefront-angle-distortion and compensated for in the frequency domain of the hologram. The reconstruction process for the circular-array image is performed by that for a linear-array one. A re-arrangement operation for correcting the near-field curvature distortion is also introduced for pulsed-echo 2-D ultrasound holographic imaging. The method benefits from combining the holographic and B-scan principles and uniform resolution can be achieved in the whole imaging area. The greatest advantage of the method is that the fast Fourier transform can be applied to the reconstruction process and a real-time system is easily achievable for circular-array imaging