Fast Beamforming Method for Plane Wave Compounding Based on Beamspace Adaptive Beamformer and Delay-Multiply-and-Sum

Area of Science:

• Ultrasound imaging
• Medical imaging
• Signal processing

Background:

• Coherent plane wave compounding offers high frame rates but suffers from low image quality due to data-independent reconstruction.
• Adaptive beamformers like Minimum Variance (MV) and Delay-Multiply-and-Sum (DMAS) improve image quality but have limitations.
• MV enhances resolution but is computationally expensive and has minimal contrast impact; DMAS improves contrast but can over-suppress speckle.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a novel beamformer integrating MV and DMAS for enhanced spatial resolution and contrast in plane wave imaging.
• To improve the robustness and computational efficiency of adaptive beamforming techniques for ultrasound.

Main Methods:

• A new beamformer combines MV and DMAS, decorrelating echoes before MV weight estimation to enhance robustness without sacrificing resolution.
• MV weights are computed in beamspace using orthogonal beam statistics for faster processing.
• MV weights are applied to the DMAS output from multiple transmissions.

Main Results:

• The proposed method achieves superior contrast resolution without over-suppression.
• The computational complexity of the DMAS component is comparable to conventional Delay-and-Sum (DAS).
• Imaging results demonstrate significant improvements in spatial and contrast resolution compared to traditional compounding and other adaptive methods.

Conclusions:

• The novel adaptive beamforming approach enhances both spatial and contrast resolution in plane wave imaging.
• This method provides a computationally efficient and effective solution for improving ultrasound image quality.
• The technique offers better performance than existing adaptive methods, paving the way for advanced high frame rate imaging.