Coupling Fast Coherence Filtering with Fast Plane-Wave Fourier-Domain Beamforming

Certain types of Fourier-domain beamforming techniques for ultrasound image reconstruction offer high computational efficiency, which is particularly advantageous in the context of ultrafast plane-wave imaging. While many time-domain methods, typically based on delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming, are computationally more expensive, their relative flexibility allows for various extensions to support adaptive image reconstruction. For example, weighting the output of a DAS beamformer by a data-dependent sign coherence factor (SCF) has been shown to suppress sidelobes and improve image quality. As SCF weights are relatively easy to compute, we demonstrate their potential use in conjunction with fast Fourier-domain beamforming to enable low-cost adaptive imaging.