Adaptive Threshold for Eigenspace-Based Minimum Variance Beamformer for Dark Region Artifacts Elimination

Lan, Zhengfeng; Zheng, Cao; Wang, Yuanguo; Peng, Hu; Qiao, Heyuan

doi:10.1109/tim.2021.3127627

Cited by 13 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…9 In recent years, minimum variance (MV) adaptive beamformers have widely been studied and demonstrated a valuable improvement in the resolution and the contrast of the ultrasound imaging. [10][11][12][13][14] It has been shown that the MV beamformer by improving the image quality and enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio allows the array length to be reduced, or the penetration depth to be increased. 10 Also, the increased resolution of MV can particularly be helpful in super-resolution imaging techniques.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synthetic Aperture Ultrasound Imaging through Adaptive Integrated Transmitting-Receiving Beamformer

Rostamikhanghahi

Sakhaei

2023

Ultrason Imaging

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Synthetic aperture (SA) technique is very attractive for ultrafast ultrasound imaging, as the entire medium can be insonified by a single emission. It also permits applying the dynamic focusing as well as adaptive beamforming both in transmission and reception, which results in an enhanced image. In this paper, we firstly show that the problem of designing the transmit and receive beamformers in SA structure can be formulated as a problem of designing a one-way beamformer on a virtual array with a lateral response equal to that of the two-way beamformer on SA. It is also demonstrated that the length of the virtual aperture is increased to the sum of the transmit aperture length and the receive one, which can result in an enhanced resolution. Moreover, a better estimation of the covariance matrix can be obtained which can be utilized for applying adaptive minimum variance (MV) beamforming method on the virtual array, and consequently the resolution and contrast properties would be enhanced. The performance of the new method is compared with other existing MV-based methods and is quantified by some metrics such as the full width at half maximum (FWHM) and generalized contrast to noise ratio (GCNR). Our validations on simulations and experimental data have shown that the new method is capable of obtaining higher GCNR values while retaining or decreasing FWHM values almost all the time. Moreover, for the same subarray length for estimating the covariance matrices, the computational burden of the new method is significantly lower than those of the existing rival methods.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synthetic Aperture Ultrasound Imaging through Adaptive Integrated Transmitting-Receiving Beamformer

Rostamikhanghahi

Sakhaei

2023

Ultrason Imaging

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“…However, it tends to generate dark-region artifacts beside hyperechoic point-like targets. To deal with this issue, the eigenvalue threshold in ESBMV determined based on normalized spatial coherence [ 8 ] and normalized reciprocal of amplitude standard deviation [ 9 ] was successfully studied. Moreover, the forward–backward (FB) spatial smoothing technique was implemented in MV to increase the robustness [ 10 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Minimum variance beamforming combined with covariance matrix-based adaptive weighting for medical ultrasound imaging

Wang

Liu

et al. 2022

BioMed Eng OnLine

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Background The minimum variance (MV) beamformer can significantly improve the image resolution in ultrasound imaging, but it has limited performance in noise reduction. We recently proposed the covariance matrix-based statistical beamforming (CMSB) for medical ultrasound imaging to reduce sidelobes and incoherent clutter. Methods In this paper, we aim to improve the imaging performance of the MV beamformer by introducing a new pixel-based adaptive weighting approach based on CMSB, which is named as covariance matrix-based adaptive weighting (CMSAW). The proposed CMSAW estimates the mean-to-standard-deviation ratio (MSR) of a modified covariance matrix reconstructed by adaptive spatial smoothing, rotary averaging, and diagonal reducing. Moreover, adaptive diagonal reducing based on the aperture coherence is introduced in CMSAW to enhance the performance in speckle preservation. Results The proposed CMSAW-weighted MV (CMSAW-MV) was validated through simulation, phantom experiments, and in vivo studies. The phantom experimental results show that CMSAW-MV obtains resolution improvement of 21.3% and simultaneously achieves average improvements of 96.4% and 71.8% in average contrast and generalized contrast-to-noise ratio (gCNR) for anechoic cyst, respectively, compared with MV. in vivo studies indicate that CMSAW-MV improves the noise reduction performance of MV beamformer. Conclusion Simulation, experimental, and in vivo results all show that CMSAW-MV can improve resolution and suppress sidelobes and incoherent clutter and noise. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of CMSAW in improving the imaging performance of MV beamformer. Moreover, the proposed CMSAW with a computational complexity of $$O(N^2)$$ O ( N 2 ) has the potential to be implemented in real time using the graphics processing unit.

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“…The delay-multiply-and-standard-deviation (DMASD) factor based on the delay and standard deviation (DASD) beamforming [36], which uses the ASD of echo signals, was introduced to enhance the image contrast [37]. In addition, the ASD has also been studied to reduce the dark-region artifacts introduced by ESBMV in CPWC imaging [38].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

High-Quality Coherent Plane-Wave Compounding Using Enhanced Covariance-Matrix-Based Statistical Beamforming

et al. 2022

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Coherent plane-wave compounding (CPWC) enables high-frame-rate ultrasound imaging, but the imaging quality is mainly determined by the beamforming method. Covariance-matrix-based statistical beamforming (CMSB) was previously proposed for synthetic aperture ultrasound imaging, which provides notable improvements in resolution and contrast over conventional delay-and-sum (DAS). However, the speckle quality is inadequate in the phantom experiment, and there exists a tradeoff between the contrast and speckle preservation of CMSB due to the constant diagonal reducing factor. In this paper, we applied CMSB in CPWC ultrasound imaging and propose an enhanced CMSB approach for CPWC to enhance the image quality. First, we introduced lag-one coherence (LOC) as an adaptive weighting factor for CMSB to suppress incoherent noise. Then, we propose adaptive diagonal reducing for CMSB using the coherence factor and amplitude standard deviation, with the aim to further improve the speckle quality. Finally, the combination of LOC weighting and adaptive diagonal reducing is proposed for CMSB to simultaneously improve the contrast and speckle quality. A simulation, experiments, and carotid studies were used to validate the imaging performance of the proposed methods. Results from the experiments show that LOC-weighted CMSB (LOCw-CMSB) with adaptive diagonal reducing improves the average contrast, generalized contrast-to-noise ratio (gCNR), and speckle signal-to-noise ratio (sSNR) by 59.9%, 53.6%, and 77.7%, respectively, in comparison with DMAS. The contrast and sSNR of the LOCw-CMSB with adaptive diagonal reducing were improved by 32.3% and 33.1%, respectively, compared to CMSB. In addition, LOCw-CMSB with adaptive diagonal reducing improves the contrast by 176.6% compared with SLSC in the in vivo carotid study, while it obtains a comparable gCNR. These results demonstrate that the proposed methods are effective in improving the image quality of CPWC imaging.

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Adaptive Threshold for Eigenspace-Based Minimum Variance Beamformer for Dark Region Artifacts Elimination

Cited by 13 publications

References 41 publications

Synthetic Aperture Ultrasound Imaging through Adaptive Integrated Transmitting-Receiving Beamformer

Synthetic Aperture Ultrasound Imaging through Adaptive Integrated Transmitting-Receiving Beamformer

Minimum variance beamforming combined with covariance matrix-based adaptive weighting for medical ultrasound imaging

High-Quality Coherent Plane-Wave Compounding Using Enhanced Covariance-Matrix-Based Statistical Beamforming

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