Plane-wave compounding with adaptive joint coherence factor weighting

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel adaptive joint coherence factor weighting method for coherent plane wave compounding in ultrasound imaging, enhancing image quality by evaluating and weighting signals based on their joint spatio-angular coherence.

Contribution

It proposes a fine-grained approach to evaluate and weight signals individually using joint coherence, improving ultrasound image quality over existing methods.

Findings

JCF weighting improves image clarity in phantom and human tissue imaging.

The method enhances contrast and resolution compared to traditional techniques.

Standardized image display facilitates comparison of beamforming methods.

Abstract

Coherent Plane Wave Compounding (CPWC) is widely used for ultrasound imaging. This technique involves sending plane waves into a sample at different transmit angles and recording the resultant backscattered echo at different receive positions. The time-delayed signals from the different combinations of transmit angles and receive positions are then coherently summed to produce a beamformed image. Various techniques have been developed to characterize the quality of CPWC beamforming based on the measured coherence across the transmit or receive apertures. Here, we propose a more fine-grained approach where the signals from every transmit/receive combination are separately evaluated using a quality metric based on their joint spatio-angular coherence. The signals are then individually weighted according to their measured Joint Coherence Factor (JCF) prior to being coherently summed. To facilitate the comparison of JCF beamforming compared to alternative techniques, we further propose a method of image display standardization based on contrast matching. We show results from tissue-mimicking phantoms and human soft-tissue imaging. Fine-grained JCF weighting is found to improve CPWC image quality compared to alternative approaches.