United Wiener postfilter for plane wave compounding ultrasound imaging

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Ultrasound Technology
• Signal Processing

Background:

• Plane wave compounding (PWC) is crucial for ultrafast ultrasound imaging.
• Existing beamforming methods like coherence factor (CF) and Wiener postfilter have limitations, including over-suppression and artifacts.
• Conventional methods do not fully leverage spatial coherence in PWC, impacting performance and increasing computation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a united Wiener postfilter specifically designed for PWC.
• To enhance the imaging quality of PWC by improving resolution and contrast.
• To address the over-suppression drawbacks of traditional CF methods.

Main Methods:

• Developed a novel Wiener postfilter that estimates signal and noise power using echo signal matrices.
• Integrated theoretical relationships between CF and Wiener filtering.
• Evaluated performance through simulations, phantom studies, and in vivo experiments, comparing against DAS, CF, GCF, and scaled Wiener beamformers.

Main Results:

• The proposed method demonstrated superior resolution and contrast compared to DAS and conventional Wiener beamformers.
• Achieved significant improvements in contrast ratio (26.7% sim, 28.7% phantom) and contrast-to-noise ratio (25.2% sim, 32.4% phantom).
• Effectively mitigated the over-suppression issue associated with the CF method and showed good performance in speckle signal-to-noise ratio and generalized contrast-to-noise ratio.

Conclusions:

• The developed united Wiener postfilter is effective for PWC ultrafast ultrasound imaging.
• The method enhances image resolution, contrast, and signal-to-noise ratios.
• It offers a significant improvement over existing beamforming techniques for PWC.