A study on improvement of lateral resolution in synthetic aperture super-resolution ultrasound imaging

Ultrasound imaging is applied to various fields because it is noninvasive and real-time imaging is possible. However, in the field of diagnosis imaging, ultrasound imaging is inferior in resolution to other modalities, so researches to improve resolution are actively conducted. We proposed a method called the SCM (Super resolution FM-Chirp correlation Method) that improves the range resolution based on frequency sweep. In order to improve the frame rate, the SCM was extended to the SA-SCM (Synthetic Aperture-SCM) by incorporating synthetic aperture beamforming using divergent waves in the SCM. However, these methods improve only the range resolution. Therefore, in this study, we aim at high lateral resolution by using F-DMAS (Filtered-Delay Multiply and Sum) of analytic signal representation as the beamforming method.