Fast Fourier beamforming for arbitrary ultrasound imaging sequences based on a k‑space implementation of reverse‑time migration

The goal of Fourier beamforming is to reconstruct ultrasound images more quickly than delay-and-sum beamforming by leveraging the underlying mapping from the frequency-domain representation of the channel data to the k-space representation of the image. However, a current drawback of Fourier beamforming is its inability to generalize well to different imaging sequences. Stolt mappings have been derived for very specific imaging sequences, such as plane-wave and multistatic synthetic aperture. This work presents a generalized Stolt mapping based on reverse-time migration that can be applied to any imaging sequence. In Field II simulations of plane-wave and focused transmits, we observe that the proposed technique is comparable to REFoCUS and produces up to a 20% improvement in point target resolution compared to existing Fourier beamformers and DAS beamforming due its ability image edge waves.