Notice of Removal: Virtual source synthetic aperture focusing and coherence factor weighting for intravascular ultrasound (IVUS)

Abstract

Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) has frequently been used by the cardiologist to diagnose atherosclerosis and guide the interventional procedures. IVUS has gained widely clinical acceptance over the past twenty years because of its superior capability to assess plaque burden and monitor artery remodeling, which also makes it as the irreplaceable image modality for most innovative multimodality intravascular imaging techniques. However, in current IVUS image, the lateral resolution and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) are dramatically downgraded along with the axial direction due to beam divergence of single element transducer, which hinders it from imaging the deeper region of artery wall explicitly. In this study, we report on the application of an ultrasound beamforming method that combines virtual source synthetic aperture (VSSA) focusing and coherence factor weighting (CFW) to improve the IVUS image quality over the entire field of view (FOV).