Comparison of cepstrum based methods for radial blind deconvolution of ultrasound images

Compares the performance of seven different cepstrum based methods for radial blind deconvolution of medical ultrasound images. The first is the generalized cepstrum method and the second is the spectral root cepstrum method. All the last five methods calculate the complex cepstrum, but different computational techniques are employed to reduce or eliminate aliasing, phase unwrapping or effects of noise. The third method simply computes the real cepstrum. The fourth method computes the complex cepstrum using phase unwrapping, the fifth substitutes differentiation for phase unwrapping, the sixth uses polynomial rooting in the spatial domain, and the seventh computes the complex cepstrum from the bispectrum. Using in vivo radio frequency data from a clinical scanner, the generalized cepstrum method gave the best images. This result is an important guideline for selecting a specific cepstrum based radial deconvolution method for real time implementation in ultrasound scanners.