Ringing Artifact Reduction Method for Ultrasound Reconstruction Using Multi-Agent Consensus Equilibrium

TL;DR

This paper introduces RARE-MACE, a novel multi-agent consensus equilibrium framework that significantly reduces ringing artifacts in ultrasound image reconstruction, improving quality over existing SAFT and UMBIR methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a new physics-based multi-agent framework that effectively suppresses ringing artifacts in ultrasound images with high fractional bandwidth.

Findings

Substantial image quality improvements demonstrated on simulated data

Effective ringing artifact suppression in experimental measurements

Outperforms traditional SAFT and UMBIR methods

Abstract

Non-destructive characterization of multi-layered structures that can be accessed from only a single side is important for applications such as well-bore integrity inspection. Existing methods related to Synthetic Aperture Focusing Technique (SAFT) rapidly produce acceptable results but with significant artifacts. Recently, ultrasound model-based iterative reconstruction (UMBIR) approaches have shown significant improvements over SAFT. However, even these methods produce ringing artifacts due to the high fractional-bandwidth of the excitation signal. In this paper, we propose a ringing artifact reduction method for ultrasound image reconstruction that uses a multi-agent consensus equilibrium (RARE-MACE) framework. Our approach integrates a physics-based forward model that accounts for the propagation of a collimated ultrasonic beam in multi-layered media, a spatially varying image prior, and a denoiser designed to suppress the ringing artifacts that are characteristic of reconstructions from high-fractional bandwidth ultrasound sensor data. We test our method on simulated and experimental measurements and show substantial improvements in image quality compared to SAFT and UMBIR.