Plane wave ultrasound imaging using compressive sensing and minimum variance beamforming

Area of Science:

• Medical Ultrasound Imaging
• Signal Processing
• Image Reconstruction

Background:

• Coherent plane-wave compounding (CPWC) offers high frame rates in medical ultrasound.
• Increasing plane waves improves image quality, but further enhancements are needed.
• Existing methods for CPWC image quality improvement have limitations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a novel compressive sensing (CS) based adaptive minimum variance (MV) technique for enhanced CPWC imaging.
• To improve image resolution and contrast in medical ultrasound.
• To reduce the computational complexity and memory requirements of CS methods.

Main Methods:

• A CS-based MV technique is proposed, utilizing CS in the receive direction for beamforming.
• The MV algorithm is applied in the plane wave transmit angle direction for coherent compounding.
• An approximation is incorporated to mitigate high computational and memory demands.

Main Results:

• Simulated point target data show resolution improvements of 71% (vs. DAS), 5.5% (vs. DAS+MV), and 37% (vs. CS+DAS).
• Experimental contrast phantom data (PICMUS) reveal contrast ratio improvements of 3.02 dB (vs. DAS), 2.57 dB (vs. DAS+MV), and 2.24 dB (vs. double-MV).

Conclusions:

• The proposed CS-based MV technique significantly enhances image resolution and contrast in CPWC ultrasound.
• The method offers a practical solution by reducing computational burden and memory usage.
• This approach demonstrates strong performance for medical ultrasound image quality improvement.