Ultrafast Power Doppler Imaging Using Frame-Multiply-and-Sum-Based Nonlinear Compounding

Kang, Jinbum; Go, Dooyoung; Song, Ilseob; Yoo, Yangmo

doi:10.1109/tuffc.2020.3011708

Cited by 24 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…The proposed TMAS power Doppler estimation may be applicable to not only DAS beamforming as demonstrated in this work, but also other adaptive beamforming methods. For example, when the TMAS power Doppler estimation is combined with any beamforming, which exploits the spatial coherence of blood flow signal in either the dimension of the receiving channel or the PW transmit angles such as in [ 16 , 17 , 19 , 20 , 24 , 25 , 26 ], the corresponding power Doppler imaging would rely on the spatial–temporal coherence of the blood flow signal to produce the image pixel. In this case, a smaller pt value may be used in a TMAS algorithm to alleviate the signal decorrelation of high-velocity blood flow, while the overall noise suppression remains unchanged due to the inclusion of spatial coherence in the beamforming stage.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several beamforming methods have been proposed to reduce the noise level of power Doppler imaging in PW imaging by extracting the signal coherence in the spatial direction. For example, the coherent flow power Doppler (CFPD) method [ 16 , 17 ] relies on short-lag spatial coherence [ 18 ] to extract the coherence of the blood flow signal in the dimension of the receiving channel, while the Delay Multiply-and-Sum (DMAS) beamforming one is used to highlight the coherence of blood flow signal in the dimension of the PW transmit angles [ 19 , 20 ]. Note that, although the original DMAS beamforming method is implemented by simply multiplying the received echoes between every possible pair [ 21 ], alternative high-order versions of DMAS beamforming have been recently proposed to improve the computational efficiency and the flexibility of the tunable image quality [ 22 , 23 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ultrasound Ultrafast Power Doppler Imaging with High Signal-to-Noise Ratio by Temporal Multiply-and-Sum (TMAS) Autocorrelation

Shen

Guo

2022

Sensors

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Coherent plane wave compounding (CPWC) reconstructs transmit focusing by coherently summing several low-resolution plane-wave (PW) images from different transmit angles to improve its image resolution and quality. The high frame rate of CPWC imaging enables a much larger number of Doppler ensembles such that the Doppler estimation of blood flow becomes more reliable. Due to the unfocused PW transmission, however, one major limitation of the Doppler estimation in CPWC imaging is the relatively low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Conventionally, the Doppler power is estimated by a zero-lag autocorrelation which reduces the noise variance, but not the noise level. A higher-lag autocorrelation method such as the first-lag (R(1)) power Doppler image has been developed to take advantage of the signal coherence in the temporal direction for suppressing uncorrelated random noises. In this paper, we propose a novel Temporal Multiply-and-Sum (TMAS) power Doppler detection method to further improve the noise suppression of the higher-lag method by modulating the signal coherence among the temporal correlation pairs in the higher-lag autocorrelation with a tunable pt value. Unlike the adaptive beamforming methods which demand for either receive–channel–domain or transmit–domain processing to exploit the spatial coherence of the blood flow signal, the proposed TMAS power Doppler can share the routine beamforming architecture with CPWC imaging. The simulated results show that when it is compared to the original R(1) counterpart, the TMAS power Doppler image with the pt value of 2.5 significantly improves the SNR by 8 dB for the cross-view flow velocity within the Nyquist rate. The TMAS power Doppler, however, suffers from the signal decorrelation of the blood flow, and thus, it relies on not only the pt value and the flow velocity, but also the flow direction relative to the geometry of acoustic beam. The experimental results in the flow phantom and in vivo dataset also agree with the simulations.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ultrasound Ultrafast Power Doppler Imaging with High Signal-to-Noise Ratio by Temporal Multiply-and-Sum (TMAS) Autocorrelation

Shen

Guo

2022

Sensors

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“…2) Frame Multiply and Sum: FMAS is an existing technique already applied to 1-D probes [31]. In this study it will be applied in 3-D for the first time.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Coherence beamforming is an emerging technique that would be used as an alternative for DAS beamforming with many different techniques having been recently proposed including Delay Multiply and Sum (DMAS) [30], Frame Multiply and Sum (FMAS) [31], coherence factor [32], [33], shortlag spatial coherence [34] and acoustic subaperture processing (ASAP) [35] amongst others. Compared to coherence-based beamforming using individual transducer element/data channel, such as DMAS and short-lag spatial coherence, coherencebased beamforming using imaging frames, such as FMAS can better take advantage of the highly complementary image frames generated by rows and columns in an RCA probe.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ultrafast 3-D Ultrasound Imaging Using Row–Column Array-Specific Frame-Multiply-and-Sum Beamforming

Hansen-Shearer¹,

Lerendegui²,

Toulemonde³

et al. 2022

IEEE Trans. Ultrason., Ferroelect., Freq. Contr.

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Row-column arrays have been shown to be able to generate 3-D ultrafast ultrasound images with an order of magnitude less independent electronic channels than traditional 2-D matrix arrays. Unfortunately, row-column array images suffer from major imaging artefacts due to high side-lobes, particularly when operating at high frame rates. This paper proposes a rowcolumn specific beamforming technique, for orthogonal plane wave transmissions, that exploits the incoherent nature of certain row-column array artefacts. A series of volumetric images are produced using row or column transmissions of 3-D plane waves. The voxel-wise geometric mean of the beamformed volumetric images from each row and column pair is taken prior to compounding, which drastically reduces the incoherent imaging artefacts in the resulting image compared to traditional coherent compounding. The effectiveness of this technique was demonstrated in silico and in vitro, and the results show a significant reduction in side-lobe level with over 16 dB improvement in sidelobe to main-lobe energy ratio. Significantly improved contrast was demonstrated with contrast ratio increased by ∼10dB and generalised contrast-to-noise ratio increased by 158% when using the proposed new method compared to existing delay and sum during in vitro studies. The new technique allowed for higher quality 3-D imaging whilst maintaining high frame rate potential.

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“…Coherence beamforming is an emerging technique that would be used as an alternative for DAS beamforming. Many different coherence beamforming techniques have been recently proposed including Delay Multiply and Sum [18], Frame Multiply and Sum (FMAS) [19], coherence factor [20,21], short-lag spatial coherence [22] and acoustic subaperture processing (ASAP) [23] amongst others. We are not aware of any existing studies to apply coherent based beamforming to RCAs.…”

Section: Introduction/theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

High contrast Ultrafast 3D Ultrasound Imaging using Row Column specific Frame Multiply and Sum

Hansen-Shearer,

Lerendegui,

Toulemonde

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Row-column arrays have shown to be able to generate 3-D ultrafast ultrasound images with an order of magnitude less independent electronic channels than classic 2D matrix arrays. Unfortunately row-column array images suffer from major imaging artefacts due to the high side lobes. This paper proposes a row-column specific beamforming technique that exploits the incoherent nature of certain row column array artefacts. The geometric mean of the data from each row and column pair is taken prior to summation in beamforming, thus drastically reducing incoherent imaging artefacts compared to traditional coherent compounding. The effectiveness of this technique was demonstrated in silico, and the results show an average fivefold reduction in side-lobe levels. Significantly improved contrast was demonstrated with Tissue-to-noise ratio increasing from ∼10dB to ∼30dB and Tissue Contrast Ratio increasing from ∼21dB to ∼42dB when using the proposed new method compared to Delay and Sum. These new techniques allowed for high quality 3D imaging whilst maintaining high frame rate potential.

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Ultrafast Power Doppler Imaging Using Frame-Multiply-and-Sum-Based Nonlinear Compounding

Cited by 24 publications

References 42 publications

Ultrasound Ultrafast Power Doppler Imaging with High Signal-to-Noise Ratio by Temporal Multiply-and-Sum (TMAS) Autocorrelation

Ultrasound Ultrafast Power Doppler Imaging with High Signal-to-Noise Ratio by Temporal Multiply-and-Sum (TMAS) Autocorrelation

Ultrafast 3-D Ultrasound Imaging Using Row–Column Array-Specific Frame-Multiply-and-Sum Beamforming

High contrast Ultrafast 3D Ultrasound Imaging using Row Column specific Frame Multiply and Sum

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