Low-sampling-frequency plane wave medical ultrasound imaging based on adversarial learning

In plane wave medical ultrasound imaging, the analog echo signals are received via the transducer, and sampled as digital radio frequency data which is further processed by the beamforming algorithm to obtain the output ultrasound image. The sampling frequency of radio frequency data has a great impact on the image quality. The radio frequency data with higher sampling frequency is closer to the true distribution of the analog echo signals, leading to better image quality. However, high-frequency sampling chips are usually expensive. Thus, improving the plane wave imaging quality for radio frequency data with low sampling frequency has important practical significance. The ultrasound imaging quality is mainly affected by shallow features such as texture and color. However, low-sampling-frequency data has poor shallow features while high-sampling-frequency data has better shallow features. In this work, we propose an adversarial learning method to replace the shallow features of low-frequency data with the shallow features of high-frequency data, but retaining the deep features of low-frequency data. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method improves the plane wave imaging quality for low-sampling-frequency data by fusing shallow and deep features.