Investigations into Fourier beamforming for medical ultrasound imaging have largely been limited to plane-wave and single-element transmissions. The main aim of this work is to generalize Fourier beamforming to enable synthetic aperture imaging with arbitrary transmit sequences. When applied to focused transmit beams, the proposed approach yields a full-waveform-based alternative to virtual-source synthetic aperture, which has implications for both coherence imaging and sound speed estimation. When compared to virtual-source synthetic aperture and retrospective encoding for conventional ultrasound sequences (REFoCUS), the proposed imaging technique shows an 8.6 and 3.8 dB improvement in contrast over virtual source synthetic aperture and REFoCUS, respectively, and a 55% improvement in point target resolution over virtual source synthetic aperture. The proposed image reconstruction technique also demonstrates general imaging improvements in vivo, while avoiding limitations seen in prior techniques.

对用于医学超声成像的傅立叶波束成形的研究在很大程度上仅限于平面波和单元传输。这项工作的主要目的是推广傅立叶波束成形，以实现具有任意发射序列的合成孔径成像。当应用于聚焦发射波束时，所提出的方法产生了一种基于全波形的虚拟源合成孔径替代方案，这对相干成像和声速估计都有影响。与传统超声序列的虚拟源合成孔径和回溯编码 (REFoCUS) 相比，所提出的成像技术显示，与虚拟源合成孔径和 REFoCUS 相比，对比度分别提高了 8.6 和 3.8 dB，点目标提高了 55%虚拟源合成孔径的分辨率。