There exists an evident difference in material properties between soft tissue and skull bone. Thus, image degradation, e.g., deformation and aliasing, occur when using the conventional ultrasonic imaging technologies (beamforming), which hinders ultrasound transcranial imaging in the clinical applications.

Basing on phase migration theory, we presented a transcranial aberration correction and imaging method, which works in the spectrum domain. The experimental results in phantoms proved that we can suppress the artifacts for point scatterers (axial and lateral resolution improvement), and weaken the deformation for cylinder scatterers (eccentricity dropdown). Compared with the ray-tracing based aberration correction, the proposed spectrum method shows comparable resolution and eccentricity improvement, and superior contrast to noise ratio (17 percent). These results show the potential of the proposed method in the field of transcranial distortion correction and imaging.

The relevant research was published inIEEE UFFCon Jan 1, 2021, with the title of "Full-Matrix Phase Shift Migration Method for Transcranial Ultrasonic Imaging". The doctoral student Chen Jiang is the first author, and the Young Researcher Kailiang Xu and Professor Dean Ta are the corresponding authors. This work was supported by the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars and Program of Shanghai Academic Research Leader, Shanghai Natural Science Foundation, Shanghai Rising Star Program, State Key Laboratory of ASIC and System Project.（Chen Jiang, Ying Li, Kailiang Xu* and Dean Ta*. IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control, vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 72-83, Jan. 2021）