A Low-complexity Minimum-variance Beamformer Based on Orthogonal Decomposition of the Compounded Subspace

Minimum-variance (MV) beamforming, as a typical adaptive beamforming method, has been widely studied in medical ultrasound imaging. This method achieves higher spatial resolution than traditional delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming by minimizing the total output power while maintaining the desired signals. However, it suffers from high computational complexity due to the heavy calculation load when determining the inverse of the high-dimensional matrix. Low-complexity MV algorithms have been studied recently. In this study, we propose a novel MV beamformer based on orthogonal decomposition of the compounded subspace (CS) of the covariance matrix in synthetic aperture (SA) imaging, which aims to reduce the dimensions of the covariance matrix and therefore reduce the computational complexity. Multiwave spatial smoothing is applied to the echo signals for the accurate estimation of the covariance matrix, and adaptive weight vectors are calculated from the low-dimensional subspace of the original covariance matrix. We conducted simulation, experimental and in vivo studies to verify the performance of the proposed method. The results indicate that the proposed method performs well in maintaining the advantage of high spatial resolution and effectively reduces the computational complexity compared with the standard MV beamformer. In addition, the proposed method shows good robustness against sound velocity errors.