High-resolution and high-contrast ultrafast ultrasound imaging using coherent plane wave adaptive compounding. (March 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hashemseresht, Maryam; Afrakhteh, Sajjad; Behnam, Hamid
• Is Part Of: Biomedical signal processing and control. Volume 73(2022)
• Publication Date: 2022-03
• Subjects: Ultrasound -- Resolution -- Minimum variance -- Coherent plane wave compounding -- Frame rate; Signal processing -- Periodicals; Biomedical engineering -- Periodicals; Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted -- Periodicals; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted -- Periodicals; Biomedical Engineering -- Periodicals; 610.28
• DOI: 10.1016/j.bspc.2021.103446
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1746-8094

Abstract

Highlights: CPWC enhances the image quality by imaging at different angles and coherently combining. The paper proposes a new adaptive CPWC imaging, which is called CPWAC imaging. CPWAC increases the frame rate while having better image quality compared to the CPWC. The performance of the CPWC method has improved with low time complexity. Results showed that CPWAC obtained better image quality, even by selection rates of 33%. Abstract: Plane-wave imaging (PWI) is an interesting technique for increasing frame rate in medical ultrasound imaging, but it suffers from poor image quality. To overcome this problem, the coherent plane-wave compounding (CPWC) approach has been introduced, which provides the possibility of achieving the desired resolution and contrast by combining images obtained from different angles. In this paper, we proposed a new technique based on adaptive compounding of resulted radio frequency (RF) image data at different angles to obtain a high-resolution image. We called this method coherent plane wave adaptive compounding (CPWAC). The adaptive method used here is the minimum variance (MV) approach. An important benefit of the CPWAC method is that the calculation and inversion of the covariance matrix is done only once. We applied the proposed method on simulated, experimental, and in vivo datasets of the plane wave imaging challenge in medical ultrasound (PICMUS) data by considering 75 and 25 plane waves (PW). The results showed that the proposed CPWAC improves the lateral full width at half maximum (FWHM) by 35% for both simulated and experimental datasets, even by using 33% of the total angles compared to CPWC, which indicates simultaneous improvement of lateral resolution and frame rate. In addition, for the experimental dataset, this method has improved the {CR, CNR} about {103.8%, 100%} and {30.28%, 28%} in the near-field and far-field, respectively. Therefore, while the proposed method does not add much time overhead compared to the original CPWC, it improves the image quality of the CPWC significantly.