Adaptive Coherence Factor method based on Dominant Mode Rejection Beamformer for Ultrasound Plane Wave Imaging

The coherent plane-wave compounding imaging (CPWCI) method enables ultrasound imaging scanners to visualize soft tissues, allowing a higher frame rate. This work presents the performance evaluation results of the non-adaptive DAS method and the following adaptive beamformers: minimum variance (MV), Coherence factor-based MV (CF-MV), and Dominant Mode Rejection (DMR). The Coherence Factor based on DMR (CF-DMR) is proposed and compared with the previous methods (i.e., DAS, MV, MV-CF, and DMR) in terms of Contrast Resolution (CR), Contrast to Noise Ratio (CNR), and Full Width at Half Maximum (FWHM) and the indicative computational complexity (CC). The experiments used simulated and phantom datasets from the Plane Wave Challenge in Medical Ultrasound (PICMUS) platform. The Ultra Sound Tool Box (USTB) was used for data processing. For CR evaluation using simulation data, the following values, in dB, were obtained: DAS (0.25); MV (0.5); MV–CF (1.2); DMR (0.5) and DMR-CF (1.25) for CR. Meanwhile, for FWHM, axial and lateral evaluation in (mm), respectively, DAS (0.22), MV (0.22), MVCF (0.24), DMR (0.24), and DMRCF (0.22), and DAS (1.21), MV (0.37), MVCF (0.22), DMR (0.41) and DMRCF (0.26) for lateral evaluation. The CC evaluation for DAS, MV, MV-CF, DMR, and DMR-CF, respectively, presented 255, 39488, 40963, 902, and 2377, so that the DMR-CF outperforms the MV and MV-CF; however, it fails from DAS and DMR. On the other hand, DMR-CF outperforms the different methods in terms of FWHM and CR. The adaptive DMR-CF suits medical ultrasound imaging applications demanding high frame rates.