Fresnel beamforming for compact portable ultrasound array system

This paper presents a new beamforming method that may reduce the size and cost of the system with minimized image quality tradeoffs. Applying optical Fresnel principles in ultrasound imaging, a system with 4 transmit and 2 receive channels can be used to steer and focus an array with 64 to 128 elements. The spatial resolution and contrast-to-noise ratios obtained from simulation and experiment show that the spatial resolution using an 8-phase Fresnel beamforming method is comparable to those values obtained from traditional delay-and-sum beamforming.