Comment on "So you think you can DAS? A viewpoint on delay-and-sum beamforming" [Ultrasonics 111 (2021) 106309]

Martin F Schiffner; Georg Schmitz

doi:10.1016/j.ultras.2023.107221

Comment on "So you think you can DAS? A viewpoint on delay-and-sum beamforming" [Ultrasonics 111 (2021) 106309]

Ultrasonics. 2024 Mar:138:107221. doi: 10.1016/j.ultras.2023.107221. Epub 2023 Dec 18.

Authors

Martin F Schiffner¹, Georg Schmitz²

Affiliations

¹ Chair of Medical Engineering, Ruhr University Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany. Electronic address: martin.schiffner@rub.de.
² Chair of Medical Engineering, Ruhr University Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany. Electronic address: georg.schmitz@rub.de.

PMID: 38134514
DOI: 10.1016/j.ultras.2023.107221

Abstract

It is shown herein that Perrot et al., who reviewed delay-and-sum beamforming for ultrafast ultrasound imaging in [Ultrasonics 111 (2021) 106309], misinterpreted the purpose of dynamic receive apertures. Such apertures widen with the focal length as a function of a given f-number and improve the image quality by suppressing grating lobes. Perrot et al., however, attributed erroneously the image quality improvement to suppression of measurement noise and, in doing so, proposed a suboptimal method to determine an f-number.

Keywords: Beamforming; Delay-and-sum; Dynamic receive aperture; Ultrafast ultrasound imaging; f-number.