Compressed sensing for synthetic transmit aperture

In this paper, the previously proposed compressed sensing based synthetic transmit aperture (CS-STA) was compared with synthetic transmit aperture (STA), multi-element synthetic transmit aperture (ME-STA) and the conventional focused mode in two different phantoms. The quantitative results of full width at half-maximum (FWHM) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) demonstrated the merits of CS-STA. Besides, the results from two different phantoms verified the reproducibility of CS-STA. Moreover, the clinical potentials of CS-STA were presented through preliminary in-vivo studies on human bicipital muscle of arm and thyroid. At last, CS-STA is demonstrated to exhibit certain advantages through the comparison with coherent plane wave (CPW) compounding method.