A Performance Investigation of Receive Beamforming Schemes in Specular Tissue Characterization

TL;DR

This study compares different receive beamforming schemes in ultrasound imaging of specular reflectors, analyzing their performance across various conditions and the impact of sub-array length on image quality.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive experimental comparison of DAS, DMAS, MV, and specular beamforming schemes, including the effect of sub-array length on imaging performance.

Findings

MV beamforming's sub-array length significantly affects image quality.

DMAS and DAS show different contrast-to-noise ratios depending on reflector orientation.

Beamforming choice impacts the clarity and contrast of specular structure imaging.

Abstract

This work presents a comparison of the delay and sum (DAS), filtered delay multiply and sum (DMAS), minimum variance (MV) and specular receive beamforming schemes in the context of ultrasound imaging of specular reflectors. The main contributions of the study are, 1) a performance comparison of the four receive beamforming schemes through experimental studies for varying angulations of planar reflectors and for reflectors located at varying depths in the medium and, 2)an investigation on the influence of the sub-array length in MV beamforming on the imaging of specular structures. The qualitative conclusions are quantitatively validated in terms of contrast and generalized contrast-to-noise ratios. The study examines the benefits and drawbacks of each receive beamforming technique and highlights the significance of application-tailored beamforming schemes for imaging specular structures.