Circular statistics vector for improving coherent plane wave compounding image in Fourier domain

In this work, a circular statistics vector (CSV) weighting Fourier domain (FD) beamforming for ultrasound plane-wave images was proposed to achieve better image quality with a high frame rate. Firstly, the cosine and sine components of the instantaneous phase are extracted from undelayed RF signals. Secondly, the FD beamformed cosine and sine components are used to establish the CSV. Finally, the FD beamformed amplitude image is weighted by the CSV. The resolution, contrast, and computation complexity were used to assess the performance of the proposed method. The results revealed that FD_CSV could significantly reduce the computational load compared to the conventional DAS_CSV on the equal improvement of image quality. Besides, compared to coherence factor (CF), phase coherence factor (PCF), etc., based on variance calculation, the CSV based on mean resultant vector calculation can effectively preserve the speckle due to the more tolerant to phase errors. The proposed FD_CSV weighting method has successfully conducted high image quality and low computational load.