Real-time synthetic receive aperture imaging: experimental results

Improvements in medical ultrasonic image resolution are typically accompanied by significant increases in the number of piezoelectric array elements and beamformer channels. The synthetic receive aperture (SRA) imaging technique achieves dramatic improvements in effective beamformer channel count without concomitant increases in system cost and complexity. We have constructed a real-time SRA imaging system which forms images using a fully sampled 128 element array with a 128 channel transmit beamformer, but only a 32 channel receive beamformer. We describe this system and present initial experimental results