User Parameter-Free Minimum Variance Beamformer in Medical Ultrasound Imaging

The minimum variance beamformer (MVB) is a well-known adaptive beamformer in medical ultrasound imaging. Accurate estimation of the covariance matrix has a great effect on the performance of the MVB. In adaptive ultrasound imaging, parameters such as the subarray length, the number of samples used for temporal averaging, and the value of diagonal loading (DL) have the main role in the true estimation of the covariance matrix. The optimal values for these parameters are different from one scenario to another one. Thus, the MVB is not a parameter-free method, and its behavior is scenario-dependent. In the field of telecommunications and radar, the shrinkage method was proposed to determine the DL factor, but no method has been provided yet to determine other parameters. In this article, an adaptive approach is developed to determine the MVB parameters, which is completely independent of the user. The minimum variance variable loading along with the modified shrinkage (MVVL-MSh) algorithm is introduced to adaptively calculate the optimal DL. Also, two methods based on the coherence factor (CF) are proposed to determine the subarray length in the spatial smoothing and the number of samples required for temporal averaging. The performance of the proposed methods is evaluated using simulated and experimental RF data. It is shown that the methods preserve the contrast and improve the resolution by about 35% and 38% compared to the MV having a fix loading coefficient and the MV-Sh algorithm.