| A synthetic aperture focusing (SAF) technique denoted Synthetic Aperture Sequential Beamforming (SASB) suitable for 2D and 3D imaging is presented. The technique differ from prior art of SAF in the sense that SAF is performed on pre-beamformed data contrary to channel data. The objective is to improve and obtain a more range independent lateral resolution compared to conventional dynamic receive focusing (DRF) without compromising frame rate. SASB is a two-stage procedure using two separate beamformers. First a set of B-mode image lines using a single focal point in both transmit and receive is stored. The second stage applies the focused image lines from the first stage as input data. The SASB method has been investigated using simulations in Field II and by off-line processing of data acquired with a commercial scanner. The performance of SASB with a static image object is compared with DRF. For the lateral resolution the improvement in FWHM equals a factor of 2 and the improvement at -40 dB equals a factor of 3. With SASB the resolution is almost constant throughout the range. The resolution in the near field is slightly better for DRF. A decrease in performance at the transducer edges occur for both DRF and SASB, but is more profound for SASB. |