Improving plane wave imaging performance through post-processing

Plane wave imaging can provide high frame rates and is widely used for fast imaging in medical ultrasound. Due to a lack of transmit focus, its image quality is usually worse than other ultrasonic imaging modalities, such as Synthetic Aperture Ultrasound. In practice, images with high contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) are highly desirable as they make it possible for the sonographer to detect small cysts with better accuracy. In this work, we propose to use edge detection and smoothing filters to improve the CNR of cyst images while keeping the point spread function unchanged after beamforming. We show that our post-processing technique helps achieve CNR larger than 19 dB for cyst images with 75 firing angles compounded.