Extended aperture image reconstruction for plane-wave imaging

B-mode images undergo degradation in the boundary region because of the limited number of elements in the ultrasound probe. Herein, a deep learning-based extended aperture image reconstruction method is proposed to reconstruct a B-mode image with an enhanced boundary region. The proposed network can reconstruct an image using pre-beamformed raw data received from the half-aperture of the probe. To generate a high-quality training target without degradation in the boundary region, the target data were acquired using the full-aperture. Training data were acquired from an experimental study using a tissue-mimicking phantom, vascular phantom, and simulation of random point scatterers. Compared with plane-wave images from delay and sum beamforming, the proposed extended aperture image reconstruction method achieves improvement at the boundary region in terms of the multi-scale structure of similarity and peak signal-to-noise ratio by 8% and 4.10 dB in resolution evaluation phantom, 7% and 3.15 dB in contrast speckle phantom, and 5% and 3 dB in in vivo study of carotid artery imaging. The findings in this study prove the feasibility of a deep learning-based extended aperture image reconstruction method for boundary region improvement.