Performance Evaluation of Beam Multiply and Sum Beamforming with Coherent Plane Wave Compounding: In-vitro Results

In the recent past, a novel beamforming scheme known as beam multiply and sum (BMAS) which combines the delay and sum (DAS) and filtered delay multiply and sum (F-DMAS) and thus provides a trade-off between computational complexity and output image quality has been proposed by us. The BMAS, despite being shown to provide superior performance in contrast enhancement and lesion detection with single nonsteered plane wave imaging, its performance has not been evaluated with coherent plane wave compounding (CPWC). To this end, an experimental quantitative performance investigation of BMAS with CPWC for different sets of transmit plane wave (PW) angles is presented in this work. The resolution and contrast characteristics of BMAS beamforming with CPWC on a standard in-vitro resolution-distortion and contrast dataset and its efficacy is shown in-vivo for a carotid artery dataset from the plane-wave imaging challenge for medical ultrasound (PICMUS) dataset. We also report a qualitative and quantitative performance comparison between BMAS, DAS, F-DMAS, and minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) algorithms with CPWC. From the experimental results, it was observed that BMAS with CPWC improves the image quality with fewer PWs which signifies its potential to provide a better trade-off between frame rate and image quality in high frame rate imaging.