Weighted non-linear beamformers for low cost 2-element receive ultrasound imaging system

Abstract

In this paper, the development of modified beamforming methods, Filtered Delay Weight Multiply and Sum (F-DwMAS) and Filtered Delay Euclidian-Weighted Multiply and Sum (F-DewMAS), are reported. These methods were investigated on a minimum-redundancy synthetic aperture technique, called as 2 element Receive Synthetic Aperture Focusing Technique (2R-SAFT), which uses one element on transmit and two consecutive elements on receive, for reducing hardware complexity without compromising much on the image quality. The performance of the developed F-DwMAS and F-DewMAS methods were compared with Delay and Sum (DAS) and recently introduced F-DMAS beamforming methods. Notably, in the proposed methods, an additional aperture window function is designed and incorporated to the F-DMAS method. The different methods of F-DwMAS, F-DewMAS, F-DMAS and DAS were compared in terms of the resulting image quality metrics, Lateral Resolution (LR), Axial Resolution (AR), Contrast Ratio (CR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), in simulation and experiments on tissue-mimicking phantoms. Experimental results show that (F-DwMAS) and {F-DewMAS} resulted in improvements of AR by (46.32% and 23.51%), {43.56% and 17.78%}, LR by (47.81% and 30.27%), {44.26% and 26.14%} and CR by (45.68% and 17.15%), {42.16% and 9.87%} compared to those obtained using DAS and F-DMAS, respectively. However, CNR of F-DwMAS and F-DewMAS was found to be 31.19% and 21.16% less compared to DAS, but 4.89% and 18.64% more than F-DMAS, respectively. Hence, it can be concluded that the image quality improved by both F-DwMAS and F-DewMAS compared to DAS and F-DMAS. Also, between F-DwMAS and F-DewMAS, the later has the advantage of ready applicability to different acquisition schemes and settings compared to the former also having an additional advantage of better CNR compared to both F-DMAS and F-DewMAS.