The influence of speckle statistics on contrast metrics in ultrasound imaging

Hverven, Stine M.; Rindal, Ole Marius Hoel; Rodríguez-Molares, Alfonso; Austeng, Andreas

doi:10.1109/ultsym.2017.8091949

Cited by 12 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Table .I shows the SNR of photoacoustic images beamformed by using D-FDMAS with different sub-group size. The contrast ratio (CR) was calculated by using Eq.4 [20]:…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Monitoring Needle Biopsy of Sentinel Lymph Nodes Using Photoacoustic Image with Dynamic-FDMAS Beamformer

Alshaya

Nie

Cowell

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium (IUS)

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As a part of the diagnosis pathway for breast cancer, a needle biopsy of the sentinel lymph node (SLN) is taken for analysis. Photoacoustic imaging is a better approach for guide a needle than ultrasound imaging. However, the photoacoustic image will be affected by clutter, phase aberration and artefact from the needle. In this study, dynamic filter delay multiply and sum (D-FDMAS) beamformer was produced to reduce these effects and improve the SNR and contrast difference (CD) of imaging targets. D-FDMAS beamformer with 16 elements subgroup size (16 D-FDMAS) showed improvement in SNR of needle and inclusion (SLN) by 8.38 dB and 5.42 dB compared with delay and sum (DAS) beamfomer. It also showed reduction in CD between inclusion and needle by almost 12 dB compared with filter delay multiply and sum (FDMAS) beamformer.

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“…Table .I shows the SNR of photoacoustic images beamformed by using D-FDMAS with different sub-group size. The contrast ratio (CR) was calculated by using Eq.4 [20]:…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Monitoring Needle Biopsy of Sentinel Lymph Nodes Using Photoacoustic Image with Dynamic-FDMAS Beamformer

Alshaya

Nie

Cowell

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium (IUS)

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“…Images of CF, GCF, and SLSC show visible dark-region artifacts and low CNR and sSNR compared to the CPWC image. Multiple studies have indicated that adaptive beamforming methods alter the statistical distribution of the speckle and increase the variance of the background speckle pattern [27,42], which can be reflected from the degraded sSNR. However, using the NSVD filter in adaptive weighting methods, we can observe decreased dark-region artifacts and background variance in B-mode images, since the NSVD filter has the characteristic of smoothing images.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Speckle pattern represents the speckle statistics in ultrasound images. The speckle pattern in the DAS image closely obeys the theoretical Rayleigh distribution, while adaptive weighting methods usually alter speckle pattern and lead to a distribution far from the theoretical Rayleigh [27]. Using the DAS as a reference, the quality of speckle pattern for different beamformers means the degree of similarity as compared to the speckle pattern of DAS.…”

Section: Image Quality Metricsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Neighborhood Singular Value Decomposition Filter and Application in Adaptive Beamforming for Coherent Plane-Wave Compounding

et al. 2020

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Coherent plane-wave compounding (CPWC) is widely used in medical ultrasound imaging, in which plane-waves tilted at multiple angles are used to reconstruct ultrasound images. CPWC helps to achieve a balance between frame rate and image quality. However, the image quality of CPWC is limited due to sidelobes and noise interferences. Filtering techniques and adaptive beamforming methods are commonly used to suppress noise and sidelobes. Here, we propose a neighborhood singular value decomposition (NSVD) filter to obtain high-quality images in CPWC. The NSVD filter is applied to adaptive beamforming by combining with adaptive weighting factors. The NSVD filter is advantageous because of its singular value decomposition (SVD) and smoothing filters, performing the SVD processing in neighboring regions while using a sliding rectangular window to filter the entire imaging region. We also tested the application of NSVD in adaptive beamforming. The NSVD filter was combined with short-lag spatial coherence (SLSC), coherence factor (CF), and generalized coherence factor (GCF) to enhance performances of adaptive beamforming methods. The proposed methods were evaluated using simulated and experimental datasets. We found that NSVD can suppress noise and achieve improved contrast (contrast ratio (CR), contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) and generalized CNR (gCNR)) compared to CPWC. When the NSVD filter is used, adaptive weighting methods provide higher CR, CNR, gCNR and speckle signal-to-noise ratio (sSNR), indicating that NSVD is able to improve the imaging performance of adaptive beamforming in noise suppression and speckle pattern preservation.

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“…Among the beamformers, the minimum variance beamforming and coherence-based beamforming are two of the most representative methods [9]. The minimum variance (MV) beamformer was first proposed in the1960s [10] and Synnevag et al applied the method to the field of ultrasonic imaging [11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coherent Plane-Wave Compounding Based on United Coherence Factor

Yang

Xu³

et al. 2020

IEEE Access

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We present a united coherence factor beamformer for coherent plane-wave compounding (CPWC). CPWC is capable to reach an image quality comparable to the conventional B-mode imaging with a much higher frame rate and could be further applied to Doppler imaging. Conventional coherence factor (CF) based beamformers for CPWC use only either the spatial coherence or angular coherence information, which limits the image quality. To take full advantage of the radio frequency (RF) data for better image quality, this paper proposes a united coherence factor (uCF) using both spatial and angular information for CPWC. The proposed uCF is applied to simulated, phantom and in vivo imaging data. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method by lateral resolution and contrast. For simulated images, the contrast ratio (CR) improvements are over 80%. In the phantom images, the maximum improvements of the lateral full width at half maximum (FWHM) and CR are 10% and 105%, respectively. To compare the most core differences, the spatial and angular methods are also presented in this paper. uCF is superior in lateral resolution improvement and contrast among the beamformers. In addition, the proposed uCF performance also shows good performance in the power Doppler experiment with improved image quality, which is further verified by the spatial similarity matrix of the Doppler image. Thus, the proposed method (uCF) has a great potential to be applied in CPWC for image quality improvement.

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The influence of speckle statistics on contrast metrics in ultrasound imaging

Cited by 12 publications

References 9 publications

Monitoring Needle Biopsy of Sentinel Lymph Nodes Using Photoacoustic Image with Dynamic-FDMAS Beamformer

Monitoring Needle Biopsy of Sentinel Lymph Nodes Using Photoacoustic Image with Dynamic-FDMAS Beamformer

Neighborhood Singular Value Decomposition Filter and Application in Adaptive Beamforming for Coherent Plane-Wave Compounding

Coherent Plane-Wave Compounding Based on United Coherence Factor

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