A dynamic generalized coherence factor for side lobe suppression in ultrasound imaging

Abstract

Coherence-based weighting techniques have been widely studied to weight beamsummed data to improve image quality in ultrasound imaging. Although generalized coherence factor (GCF) enhances the robustness of coherence factor (CF) with preserved speckle pattern by including some incoherent components, the side lobe suppression performance is insufficient due to constant cut-off frequency M0. To address this problem, we introduced in this paper a dynamic GCF method, referred to as DGCF-C, based on the amplitude standard deviation and the convolution output of aperture data. The cut-off frequency is adaptively selected for GCF at each imaging point using the amplitude standard deviation of aperture data. Moreover, the convolution output of aperture data is used to calculate the dynamic GCF. The proposed method is evaluated in simulation and tissue-mimicking phantom studies. The image quality was analyzed in terms of resolution, contrast ratio (CR), generalized contrast-to-noise ratio (GCNR), speckle signal-to-noise ratio (sSNR), and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The results demonstrate that DGCF-C (Mmax=2) achieves mean resolution improvements of 35.1% in simulation, and 32.6% in experiment, compared with GCF (M0=1). Moreover, DGCF-C (Mmax=4) outperforms GCF (M0=2) with an average GCNR improvement of 13.5% and an average sSNR improvement of 15.2%, which indicates the better-preservation of speckle.