Abstract
Ultrasound imaging can be performed through narrow acoustic windows in the skull in order to minimize skull distortions. Alternatively, passive imaging using a larger aperture array can be used, which affords better resolution at the low frequencies that best penetrate the skull bone. However, to ensure image quality, it is necessary to correct for the distorting effects of the skull. In this study we examine a method to correct the distortions caused by a human skull using passive imaging of single microbubbles. The method is compared with images produced without phase correction, and those produced using a gold-standard invasive phase correction method. Using the non-invasive technique, the -6dB volume was found to vary by less than 22% from the invasive phase correction technique. By comparison, the -6dB volume when no correction was used was almost 300% larger than using the invasive correction technique. The bubblebased method introduced a positional error in the resulting image, which was most prevalent in the axial direction (on the order of 1 mm). The corrected image was biased by the location of the bubble used to calculate the correction terms. In the future, this method might be improved by using multiple bubbles to correct different regions of the image.
