Abstract
Virtual source (VS) imaging has been proposed to improve image resolution in medical ultrasound imaging. However, VS obtains a limited contrast due to the non-adaptive delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming. To improve the image contrast and provide an enhanced resolution, adaptive weighting algorithms were applied in VS imaging. In this paper, we proposed an adjustable generalized coherence factor (aGCF) for the synthetic aperture sequential beamforming (SASB) of VS imaging to improve image quality. The value of aGCF is adjusted by a sequence intensity factor (SIF) that is defined as the ratio between the effective low resolution scan lines (LRLs) intensity and total LRLs strength. The aGCF-weighted VS (aGCF-VS) images were compared with standard VS images and GCF-weighted VS (GCF-VS) images. Simulation and experimental results demonstrated that the contrast ratio (CR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) of aGCF-VS are greatly improved, compared with standard VS imaging. And in comparison with GCF-VS, aGCF-VS can obtain better CNR and speckle signal-to-noise ratio (sSNR) while maintaining similar CR. Therefore, aGCF is suitable for VS imaging to improve contrast and preserve speckle pattern.
Highlights
Ultrasound imaging plays an important role in medical diagnosis and its characteristics such as high safety, low cost, and good environmental adaptability, have made it popular in medical applications [1]
3.1 Simulation and Experimental Setup In order to verify the performance of the proposed algorithm, adjustable generalized coherence factor (aGCF)-Virtual source (VS) is compared with fixT-fixR imaging, VS imaging and GCF-weighted VS (GCF-VS) on both simulated and experimental datasets
We have studied the combination of the VS imaging method and aGCF weighting algorithm for medical ultrasound imaging
Summary
Ultrasound imaging plays an important role in medical diagnosis and its characteristics such as high safety, low cost, and good environmental adaptability, have made it popular in medical applications [1]. Synthetic aperture (SA) ultrasound imaging [2] has been investigated thoroughly for many years due to its advantage of resolution enhancement. SA needs to store all the samples of the echo signal, and the hardware requirements were high, which complicates the image reconstruction [3] and it suffers low SNR as its low transmission power. Synthetic aperture imaging based on virtual source (VSSA) was proposed to reduce the hardware requirements, extend the penetration depth, get high resolution at all imaging depths and improve image quality [4,5,6,7]. Nikolov et al [8] reported a 3D synthetic aperture imaging using a
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