Euclidian-Weighted Non-linear Beamformer for Conventional Focused Beam Ultrasound Imaging Systems

In this paper, the recently developed method of, Filtered Delay Euclidian-Weighted Multiply and Sum (F-DewMAS), is newly investigated for Conventional Focused Beamforming (CFB) technique. The performance of F-DewMAS method was compared with the established Delay and Sum (DAS) method and the popular non-linear beamforming method of F-DMAS. The different methods of F-DewMAS, F-DMAS, and DAS were compared in terms of the resulting image quality metrics, Lateral Resolution (LR), Axial Resolution (AR), Contrast Ratio (CR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), in experiments on Nylon point scatterer and CIRS Triple modality Abdominal phantoms. Experimental results show that F-DewMAS resulted in improvements of AR by 35.56% and 25.33%, LR by 42.97 % and 31.05 % and CR by 119.94% and 61.46% compared to those obtained using DAS and F-DMAS, respectively. The CNR of F-DewMAS is 46.33 % more compared to F-DMAS. Hence, it can be concluded that the image quality is improved appreciably by F-DewMAS compared to DAS and F-DMAS.Clinical Relevance-The developed method can improve the resolution and contrast of the image, which results in better visualization of finer details and thus may aid in better diagnosis.