Two-Dimensional Spatial Coherence for Ultrasonic DMAS Beamforming in Multi-Angle Plane-Wave Imaging

Shen, Che-Chou; Hsieh, Ping‐Yen

doi:10.3390/app9193973

Cited by 25 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…The FDMAS beamformer realizes superior resolution and contrast in comparison with the DAS beamformer because the multiply-and-sum operation corresponds to evaluation of signal coherence [ 2 ]. The FDMAS method is also used for coherent compounding in plane-wave imaging [ 4 – 6 ].…”

Section: Beamformingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Advances in ultrasonography: image formation and quality assessment

Hasegawa

2021

J Med Ultrasonics

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Delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming is widely used for generation of B-mode images from echo signals obtained with an array probe composed of transducer elements. However, the resolution and contrast achieved with DAS beamforming are determined by the physical specifications of the array, e.g., size and pitch of elements. To overcome this limitation, adaptive imaging methods have recently been explored extensively thanks to the dissemination of digital and programmable ultrasound systems. On the other hand, it is also important to evaluate the performance of such adaptive imaging methods quantitatively to validate whether the modification of the image characteristics resulting from the developed method is appropriate. Since many adaptive imaging methods have been developed and they often alter image characteristics, attempts have also been made to update the methods for quantitative assessment of image quality. This article provides a review of recent developments in adaptive imaging and image quality assessment.

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Section: Beamformingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Advances in ultrasonography: image formation and quality assessment

Hasegawa

2021

J Med Ultrasonics

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“…Any combination of DAS and DMAS beamforming can be applied to the 2D echo matrix in the RxCh direction and the TxEt direction to determine the final B-mode image pixel. The resultant four beamforming methods include 2D-DAS (i.e., CPWC) for 2D summation of the echo matrix, 2D-DMAS for DMAS beamforming in both of RxCh and TxEt directions [13], Rx-DMAS for coherent summation in the TxEt direction and then DMAS processing in the RxCh direction [12], and Tx-DMAS for coherent summation in the RxCh direction and then DMAS processing in the TxEt direction [11]. Given the time-compensated baseband signal s nk = a nk e jφ nk for the n-th RxCh in the k-th TxEt (i.e., the k-th PW transmit angle), the four beamforming methods can be formulated as:…”

Section: Dmas Beamforming In Multi-angle Pw Imagingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several works have been developed to extend DMAS beamforming for PW imaging using either the signal coherence of the echo matrix in the TxEt direction [11] or in the RxCh direction [12]. Recently, a novel DMAS operation has also been proposed to extract the 2D spatial coherence of echo matrix for further improvement of image quality [13].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ultrasound DMAS Beamforming for Estimation of Tissue Speed of Sound in Multi-Angle Plane-Wave Imaging

Shen

2020

Applied Sciences

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Various methods have been proposed to estimate the tissue speed of sound (SOS) of propagating medium using the curvature of received channel waveform or the analysis of resultant image quality. In our previous study, baseband delay-multiply-and-sum (DMAS) beamforming methods have been developed for multi-angle plane-wave (PW) imaging which relies on signal coherence among transmit events (Tx-DMAS) or receive channel (Rx-DMAS) or both (2D-DMAS) to suppress low-coherence clutters. In this study, we further extend our DMAS beamforming to quantify the level of signal coherence for determining the average SOS in multi-angle PW imaging. The signal coherence in multi-angle PW imaging is represented as the DMAS coherence factor (DCF) which can be easily estimated from the magnitude ratio of the pixel value of DMAS image to that of DAS image. By searching the beamforming velocity that provides the highest signal coherence of echo matrix, the average tissue SOS of the imaged object can be determined. For the PICMUS experimental dataset, the optimal beamforming velocity (Copt) estimated by the proposed DCF method does provide the best image quality. For the Prodigy dataset, the estimated tissue SOS is 1426 ± 6 m/s which is very close to the actual tissue SOS of 1427 m/s and the estimated SOS also corresponds to the Copt with the minimal −6-dB lateral width and the maximal contrast within an error of 10 m/s. Estimation of tissue SOS in the proposed DCF method is also robust even in the presence of transmit delay error due to deviation of SOS.

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“…Inspired by these findings, we preliminarily developed an alternative version of MV-DMAS beamforming specifically for multi-angle PW imaging at the conference of IUS 2022 [ 35 ] and confirmed that the image resolution and contrast can be improved but at the cost of speckle quality in the background region. The degradation of speckle quality results from the intrinsic feature of the conventional DMAS algorithm in which a global p value is assigned to every image pixel regardless of its characteristics [ 36 ]. In this study, the performance of various MV beamforming methods in multi-angle PW imaging is firstly examined without considering the DMAS algorithm in order to find the optimal MV beamforming strategy in multi-angle PW imaging.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improvement in Multi-Angle Plane Wave Image Quality Using Minimum Variance Beamforming with Adaptive Signal Coherence

Shen,

Huang

2024

Sensors

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For ultrasound multi-angle plane wave (PW) imaging, the coherent PW compounding (CPWC) method provides limited image quality because of its conventional delay-and-sum beamforming. The delay-multiply-and-sum (DMAS) method is a coherence-based algorithm that improves image quality by introducing signal coherence among either receiving channels or PW transmit angles into the image output. The degree of signal coherence in DMAS is conventionally a global value for the entire image and thus the image resolution and contrast in the target region improves at the cost of speckle quality in the background region. In this study, the adaptive DMAS (ADMAS) is proposed such that the degree of signal coherence relies on the local characteristics of the image region to maintain the background speckle quality and the corresponding contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR). Subsequently, the ADMAS algorithm is further combined with minimum variance (MV) beamforming to increase the image resolution. The optimal MV estimation is determined to be in the direction of the PW transmit angle (Tx) for multi-angle PW imaging. Our results show that, using the PICMUS dataset, TxMV-ADMAS beamforming significantly improves the image quality compared with CPWC. When the p value is globally fixed to 2 as in conventional DMAS, though the main-lobe width and the image contrast in the experiments improve from 0.57 mm and 27.0 dB in CPWC, respectively, to 0.24 mm and 38.0 dB, the corresponding CNR decreases from 12.8 to 11.3 due to the degraded speckle quality. With the proposed ADMAS algorithm, however, the adaptive p value in DMAS beamforming helps to restore the CNR value to the same level of CPWC while the improvement in image resolution and contrast remains evident.

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Two-Dimensional Spatial Coherence for Ultrasonic DMAS Beamforming in Multi-Angle Plane-Wave Imaging

Cited by 25 publications

References 32 publications

Advances in ultrasonography: image formation and quality assessment

Advances in ultrasonography: image formation and quality assessment

Ultrasound DMAS Beamforming for Estimation of Tissue Speed of Sound in Multi-Angle Plane-Wave Imaging

Improvement in Multi-Angle Plane Wave Image Quality Using Minimum Variance Beamforming with Adaptive Signal Coherence

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