Dual Sidelobe-Blanking Beamforming Method for High Frame Rate Ultrasound Imaging

This article proposes a dual sidelobe-blanking (DSLB) beamforming method for high-frame-rate ultrasound (US) imaging that is based on plane-wave (PW) or diverging-wave (DW) transmission. First, a multiangle maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is performed both on noise and the desired signal to develop an adaptive sidelobe-blanking (ASLB) technique. This procedure adjusts the threshold adaptively based on the observed characteristics of the data, effectively eliminating noise in echo-free regions. Second, to address sidelobe clutter that cannot be detected under the white noise assumption in practical applications, the fixed-threshold SLB method is combined with the ASLB method and further extended into the DSLB framework. Extensive tests conducted in both in vitro and in vivo scenarios, including traditional B-mode imaging, ultrafast power Doppler (uPD) imaging, and contrast-enhanced applications, demonstrate that the proposed algorithm not only improves contrast compared to the conventional delay-and-sum (DAS) method but also has better spatial resolution. This method shows great potential in clinical environments and, due to its low complexity, is suitable for real-time implementation on portable US devices.