MVDR-based coherence weighting for high-frame-rate adaptive imaging

Some success has been demonstrated in the extensive studies of adaptive imaging, but these approaches are generally not suitable for high-frame-rate (HFR) imaging where broad transmit beams are required. In this study, we propose an effective adaptive imaging method suitable for HFR imaging based on coherence-factor (CF) weighting and the minimum-variance-distortionless-response (MVDR) method. The CF is an index of focusing quality estimated from receive-channel data in which the amplitude of each image pixel is weighted by the corresponding CF so as to reduce the unwanted sidelobes. Direct implementation of CF weighting in HFR imaging does not provide satisfactory results because the broad transmit beams required for HFR imaging reduce the accuracy of CF calculations. In this study, we alleviated this problem by applying the MVDR method. We test the proposed method with the synthetic transmit aperture method where only 8 firings are required to form an image. Both simulations and clinical breast imaging data were used, and the proposed method enhanced the mean contrast by around 4.6 dB and the mean contrast-to-noise ratio by around 20%. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective at improving the image quality.