摘要
Delay-and-sum beamformation (DAS) is the most common image reconstruction algorithm for ultrasound imaging. Its predictability, robustness, and low computational complexity make it a compromising algorithm even with lateral resolution being diffraction-limited and high sidelobe levels. Hyper-beamformation (HBF) has recently been proposed to improve lateral resolution with computational complexity similar to DAS. Besides, an integration of HBF and plane-wave compounding (HBF-PWC) has been proposed for ultrafast imaging. However, HBF-PWC might create a false-peak artifact when two-point targets were closely spaced, hindering its lateral-resolution improvement and making it only suitable for application with sparse data, i.e., ultrasound localization microscopy. In this study, we propose a novel beamforming algorithm-cross hyper-beamforming (XHBF), cross-compounding plane wave channel data from two opposite transmitting angles, and thereby creating a narrower hyper-beam, which removes the false-peak artifact in HBF-PWC and dramatically improves the resolvability when separating closely spaced point targets while retaining low computational complexity comparable to DAS. We also explore the fact that XHBF can significantly suppress grating-lobe artifacts.