A sidelobe suppressing near-field beamforming approach for ultrasound array imaging

A method is proposed to suppress sidelobe level for near-field beamforming in ultrasound array imaging. An optimization problem is established, and the second-order cone algorithm is used to solve the problem to obtain the weight vector based on the near-field response vector of a transducer array. The weight vector calculation results show that the proposed method can be used to suppress the sidelobe level of the near-field beam pattern of a transducer array. Ultrasound images following the application of weight vector to the array of a wire phantom are obtained by simulation with the Field II program, and the images of a wire phantom and anechoic sphere phantom are obtained experimentally with a 64-element 26MHz linear phased array. The experimental and simulation results agree well and show that the proposed method can achieve a much lower sidelobe level than the conventional delay and sum beamforming method. The wire phantom image is demonstrated to focus much better and the contrast of the anechoic sphere phantom image improved by applying the proposed beamforming method. (C) 2015 Acoustical Society of America.