Combined phase screen aberration correction and minimum variance beamforming in medical ultrasound

In recent years, applying adaptive beamforming to ultrasound imaging improves image quality in terms of resolution and contrast. One of the best adaptive beamformers in this field is the minimum variance (MV) beamformer which presents better resolution and edge definition compared to the traditional delay-and-sum (DAS) beamformer. However, in real situations, sound-velocity inhomogeneities cause phase aberration which leads to ambiguity in targets' location and degradation in resolution. This effect is a fundamental obstacle to utilize advantages of MV beamformer, although, in aberrating medium MV beamformer results in better performance compared to DAS. In this paper, two different levels of phase screens have been applied to simulate aberrator layers located close to the transducer. Also, prior to beamforming process, a conventional correction technique based on phase screen model is used. Simulations are performed in majority resolution of MV which has the lowest robustness. The results demonstrate that applying this correction method can retrieve the efficiency of the MV beamformer. Moreover, the method improves the performance of the MV in both terms of resolution and contrast. As corrected MV achieved at least 22% improvement in sidelobe reduction and 24% increase in contrast to noise ratio (CNR) with respect to the DAS corrected data. Also, according to experimental dataset 17% enhancement in CNR is yielded by MV.