TY - JOUR
T1 - Structured ultrasound microscopy
AU - Janjic, Jovana
AU - Kruizinga, Pieter
AU - van der Meulen, Pim
AU - Springeling, Geert
AU - Mastik, Frits
AU - Leus, Geert
AU - Bosch, Johan G.
AU - van der Steen, Antonius F.W.
AU - van Soest, Gijs
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - We present a form of acoustic microscopy, called Structured Ultrasound Microscopy (SUM). It creates a volumetric image by recording reflected echoes of ultrasound waves with a structured phase front using a moving single-element transducer and computational reconstruction. A priori knowledge of the acoustic field produced by the single element allows us to relate the received echoes to a 3D scatter map within the acoustic beam itself, leading to an isotropic resolution at all depths. An aberration mask in front of the acoustic element imposes the phase structure, broadening the beam and breaking the spatial coherence between different voxels at equal acoustic propagation delay, increasing the uniqueness of the reconstruction. By translating the transducer across the 3D volume, we synthetically enlarge the imaging aperture by using multiple overlapping and spatially sparsely sampled measurements to solve for the entire image. In this paper, we explain the SUM technique and demonstrate microscopic imaging at 20 MHz of a 2.3 × 2.3 × 1.2 mm object in water, with an isotropic resolution below 100 μm. The proposed approach allows for wide-field 3D imaging at isotropic microscopic resolution using a small unfocused ultrasound sensor and multiple spatially sparsely sampled measurements. This technique may find applications in many other fields where space is constrained, device simplicity is desired, and wide-field isotropic high-resolution imaging is required.
AB - We present a form of acoustic microscopy, called Structured Ultrasound Microscopy (SUM). It creates a volumetric image by recording reflected echoes of ultrasound waves with a structured phase front using a moving single-element transducer and computational reconstruction. A priori knowledge of the acoustic field produced by the single element allows us to relate the received echoes to a 3D scatter map within the acoustic beam itself, leading to an isotropic resolution at all depths. An aberration mask in front of the acoustic element imposes the phase structure, broadening the beam and breaking the spatial coherence between different voxels at equal acoustic propagation delay, increasing the uniqueness of the reconstruction. By translating the transducer across the 3D volume, we synthetically enlarge the imaging aperture by using multiple overlapping and spatially sparsely sampled measurements to solve for the entire image. In this paper, we explain the SUM technique and demonstrate microscopic imaging at 20 MHz of a 2.3 × 2.3 × 1.2 mm object in water, with an isotropic resolution below 100 μm. The proposed approach allows for wide-field 3D imaging at isotropic microscopic resolution using a small unfocused ultrasound sensor and multiple spatially sparsely sampled measurements. This technique may find applications in many other fields where space is constrained, device simplicity is desired, and wide-field isotropic high-resolution imaging is required.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85048750771&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:6af108fb-ddb2-40ca-918e-78c0b1c43e20
U2 - 10.1063/1.5026863
DO - 10.1063/1.5026863
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85048750771
SN - 0003-6951
VL - 112
SP - 1
EP - 5
JO - Applied Physics Letters
JF - Applied Physics Letters
IS - 25
M1 - 251901
ER -