Ultrafast ultrasound is an emerging modality that offers new perspectives and opportunities in medical imaging. Plane wave imaging (PWI) allows one to attain very high frame rates by transmission of planar ultrasound wavefronts. As a plane wave reaches a given scatterer, the latter becomes a secondary source emitting upward spherical waves and creating a diffraction hyperbola in the received RF (radio-frequency) signals. To produce an image of the scatterers, all the hyperbolas must be migrated back to their apexes. In order to perform beamforming of plane wave echo RFs and return high-quality images at high frame rates, we propose a new migration method carried out in the frequency-wavenumber (f-k) domain.The f-k migration for PWI has been adapted from the Stolt migration for seismic imaging. This migration technique is based on the exploding reflector model (ERM), which consists in assuming that all the scatterers explode in concert and become acoustic sources. The classical ERM model, however, is not appropriate for PWI. We showed that the ERM can be made suitable for PWI by a spatial transformation of the hyperbolic traces present in the RF data. In vitro experiments were performed to sketch the advantages of PWI with Stolt's f-k migration over the conventional delayand-sum (DAS) approach. The Stolt's f-k migration was also compared with the Fourier-based method developed by J-Y Lu.Our findings show that multi-angle compounded f-k migrated images are of quality similar to those obtained with a state-of-the-art dynamic focusing mode. This remained true even with a very small number of steering angles thus ensuring a highly competitive frame rate. In addition, the new FFT-based f-k migration provides comparable or better contrast-to-noise ratio and lateral resolution than the Lu's and DAS migration schemes. Matlab codes of the Stolt's f-k migration for PWI are provided.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of ultrasound and MR elastography, including a glossary of relevant terminology, a classification of elastography techniques, and a discussion of their respective strengths and limitations. CONCLUSION Elastography is an emerging technique for the noninvasive assessment of mechanical tissue properties. These techniques report metrics related to tissue stiffness, such as shear-wave speed, magnitude of the complex shear modulus, and the Young modulus.

5 J. MAGN. RESON. IMAGING 2017;45:1276-1295.