Lateral filtering of medical ultrasonic B-scans before image generation

A method is presented for improving the lateral resolution of diagnostic B-scan images. Wiener filtering is applied on sequences of A-scan echo amplitudes acquired during B-scanning, using a simple scanning action. The first applications to clinical B-scan data show an improvement in the image quality. The filtered images obtained by this techniques may provide an improvement in the performance of pattern recognition methods on medical ultrasonic image data.