Large coherent apertures: Improvements in deep abdominal imaging and fundamental limits imposed by clutter
Reverberation and aberration clutter can significantly degrade the ability to image deep abdominal structures in clinical practice. Despite increased hardware complexity and computing power, modern ultrasound arrays are still commonly limited to a length of several centimeters. We hypothesize that using a larger active aperture will improve image quality even in the presence of clutter. We use a simulated abdominal wall model to study the impact of an extended aperture and analyze both the point spread function and lesion imaging performance over a range of aperture sizes from 1 cm to 10 cm. Simulations demonstrate improved image quality as described by resolution and lesion detectability with growing aperture size up to the full extent of the 10 cm aperture. Although clutter degrades the overall imaging performance, it does not appear to impose a limit on the gains that can be made with increasing array size.
