An improved minimum variance beamforming applied to plane-wave imaging in medical ultrasound

Minimum variance beamformer (MVB) is an adaptive beamformer which provides images with higher resolution and contrast in comparison with non-adaptive beamformers like delay and sum (DAS). It finds weight vector of beamformer by minimizing output power while keeping the desired signal unchanged. We used the eigen-based MVB and generalized coherence factor (GCF) to further improve the quality of MVB beamformed images. The eigen-based MVB projects the weight vector with a transformation matrix constructed from eigen-decomposing of the array covariance matrix that increases resolution and contrast. GCF is used to emphasis on coherence part of images that improves the resolution. Four different datasets provided by IUS 2016 beamforming challenge are used to evaluate the proposed method. In comparison with DAS with rectangular weight vector, our method improved contrast about 8.52 dB and 6.20 dB for simulation and experimental contrast phantoms, respectively. It also enhanced lateral (axial) resolution about 87% (40%) and 73% (21%) for simulated and experimental resolution phantoms, respectively.