Fast adaptive beamforming through a cascade structure for ultrasound imaging

Area of Science:

• Medical Ultrasound Imaging
• Signal Processing
• Computational Imaging

Background:

• Minimum Variance (MV) beamforming is crucial for medical ultrasound.
• High computational complexity limits the application of standard MV beamformers.

Purpose of the Study:

• Introduce a novel, fast MV beamforming method for medical ultrasound.
• Achieve comparable performance to standard MV beamformers at reduced computational cost.

Main Methods:

• Implemented a cascade structure with a fixed-weight beamformer for initial echo suppression.
• Employed a spatially decimated, low-complexity MV adaptive beamformer (e.g., beamspace MV) in the second stage.
• Developed both fast and superfast MV beamforming techniques.

Main Results:

• Evaluated through simulations and experimental data.
• The proposed fast MV beamformer demonstrated competitive performance against standard MV and beamspace MV methods.
• Achieved a significantly lower computational cost compared to existing methods.

Conclusions:

• The new fast and superfast MV beamforming methods achieve results comparable to standard MV and beamspace MV.
• These methods offer a substantial reduction in computational cost for medical ultrasound imaging.