A Flexible Speckle Reduction Strategy using Thomson’s Multitaper in High-order DMAS Beamforming

Ultrasound speckle reduction using Thomson's Multitaper is capable of improving the speckle signal-to-noise ratio (SSNR) but at the cost of image resolution. High-order Delay-Multiply-and-Sum (p-DMAS) beamforming can boost image resolution by p-th-order spatial coherence of receiving aperture. Through a tunable compounding ratio, a combination strategy of p-DMAS beamforming and Thomson's Multitaper is developed to provide comparable SSNR and image resolution to conventional DAS counterpart with significant improvement in image contrast (CR). Results indicate that, for p value of 1.5 and 1.75, the proposed Thomson's Multitaper DMAS (TM-DMAS) beamforming with optimal compounding ratio improves the image CR by 9 and 13 dB while the SSNR and image resolution remains superior or comparable to that of DAS reference.