Statistical Analysis of Image Quality in Multi-Angle Compound Imaging

Behar, V.; Nikolov, Milen

doi:10.1109/jva.2006.46

Cited by 7 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Comprehensive overviews on 3D freehand ultrasound reconstruction can be found in Rohling et al (1999) and Solberg et al (2007). Furthermore, multi-angle ultrasound compounding (MACI), also referred to as spatial compounding, has demonstrated improvement in image quality, i.e., an increase in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and reduction of ultrasound speckle, as described in the works of Shankar (1986), Wilhjelm et al (2000), and Behar and Nikolov (2006).…”

Section: Ultrasound Reconstructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ultrasound confidence maps using random walks

Karamalis

Wein

Klein

et al. 2012

Medical Image Analysis

141

119

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Section: Ultrasound Reconstructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ultrasound confidence maps using random walks

Karamalis

Wein

Klein

et al. 2012

Medical Image Analysis

141

119

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“…Speckles in the ultrasound images are formed by constructive and destructive interferences of the echoes from a collection of non-resolvable scatterers [42]. Various spatial compounding (SC) methods have been developed and implemented in commercial ultrasound systems to increase the speckle SNR and improve target detectability [19,[43][44][45][46][47].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The compounding effect can be achieved by acquiring the common or overlapping subimages at multiple beam orientations. Each sub-image corresponds to one steering angle [19,46]. Another compounding technique obtains sub-images using laterally translated sub-arrays [44,48].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Novel ultrasound transmission and reconstruction techniques for synthetic transmit aperture imaging

Gong¹

2021

Preprint

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This dissertation describes ultrasound algorithms developed for synthetic transmit aperture (STA) imaging during the transmission and the image reconstruction stages. Images generated using these algorithms demonstrate image quality enhancement both theoretically and experimentally. The advanced algorithms also improve the application of STA imaging. Due to the single element transmission pattern, the low signal-to-noise ratio is a major limitation for STA imaging. A delay-encoded transmission scheme (DE-STA) was designed in this dissertation to encode all the transmissions. The decoded RF signals were equivalent to the standard STA signals, but with a higher SNR. Improved image qualities were observed under DE-STA transmission in terms of lateral resolution (+28%), peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR, +7 dB) and target contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR, +360%) compared to those acquired with the standard STA mode. The stability of DE-STA was analyzed and verified under various noise levels by the special distribution of the singular values of the encoding matrix through singular value decomposition (SVD) (i.e. all the singular values were the same except for the first one and the last one). A more efficient decoding process was also derived based on pseudo-inversion (PI) and the computation complexity was reduced by 2/3. Speckle and undesired sidelobe signals can reduce the lesion CNR and detectability in ultrasound images. Typically, the CNR can be increased by spatial compounding (SC) or frequency compounding (FC) during reconstruction. We proposed methods to implement a 2-dimentional (2-D) aperture domain filter in the SC/FC processes, referred to as filtered spatial compounding (FSC) and filtered frequency compounding (FFC), for synthetic transmit aperture (STA) imaging. Both techniques reduced the sidelobe interference and provided improved lesion CNR. Consequently, the lesion signal-to-noise ratio (lSNR) in FSC and FFC increased (up to +130%), compared to that in the standard delay-and-sum (DAS) method. This dissertation investigates all these proposed advanced ultrasound algorithms, with the end goal of implementing these methods in STA imaging to extend its application in clinic.

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“…It was found that image quality improves for increasing angular diversity, provided that speckle is uncorrelated [15][16]. To preserve the depth of the compounding region, small steering angles are typically used (bellow ±20º), being the main limitation of this method [17].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%