Spatio-temporally smoothed coherence factor for ultrasound imaging

Coherence-factor-like beamforming methods, such as the coherence factor (CF), the phase coherence factor (PCF), or the sign coherence factor (SCF), have been applied to suppress side and/or grating lobes and clutter in ultrasound imaging. These adaptive weighting factors can be implemented effectively with low computational complexity to improve image contrast properties. However, because of low SNR, the resulting images may suffer from deficiencies, including reduced overall image brightness, increased speckle variance, black-region artifacts surrounding hyperechoic objects, and underestimated magnitudes of point targets. To overcome these artifacts, a new spatio-temporal smoothing procedure is introduced to the CF method. It results in a smoothed coherence factor which measures the signal coherence among the beamsums of the divided subarrays over the duration of a transmit pulse. In addition, the procedure is extended to the SCF using the sign bits of the received signals. Simulated and real experimental data sets demonstrate that the proposed methods can improve the robustness of the CF and SCF with reduced speckle variance and significant removal of black-region artifacts, while preserving the ability to suppress clutter. Consequently, image contrast can be enhanced, especially for anechoic cysts.