Objective
Although the use of coherent plane wave compounding is a promising technique for enabling
the attainment of very high frame rate imaging, it achieves relatively low image quality
because of data-independent reconstruction. Adaptive beamformers rather than delay-and-sum
(DAS) conventional techniques have been proposed to improve the imaging quality. The
minimum variance (MV) and delay-multiply-and-sum (DMAS) beamformers have been validated
as effective in improving image quality. The MV improves mainly the resolution of
the image, while being computationally expensive and having little impact on contrast.
The DMAS increases the contrast while over-suppressing the speckle region in the case
of 2-D summation for multi-transmission applications.
Methods
In a new approach, a beamformer based on MV and DMAS is proposed to enhance both spatial
resolution and contrast in plane wave imaging. Prior to estimating the weight vector
of MV, the backscattered echoes are decorrelated without any spatial smoothing. This
enhances the robustness of MV without compromising the improvement in resolution.
With a shift from element space to beamspace, MV weights are calculated using the
spatial statistics of a set of orthogonal beams, which allows the high-complexity
algorithm to be run faster. After that, the MV weights are applied to the DMAS output
vector beamformed over different transmissions.
Discussion and Conclusion
The proposed method can result in better contrast resolution, thereby avoiding over-suppression.
The complexity of the applied DMAS version is also similar to that of DAS. Imaging
results reveal that the proposed method offers improvements over the traditional compounding
method in terms of spatial and contrast resolution. It also can achieve a higher image
quality compared with some existing adaptive methods applied in the literature.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: February 23, 2023
Accepted:
January 1,
2023
Received in revised form:
November 30,
2022
Received:
May 10,
2022
Identification
Copyright
© 2023 World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicine & Biology. All rights reserved.
