Fast transform-based adaptive beamformer for medical ultrasound imaging

Minimum Variance (MV) beamforming has been studied for high resolution ultrasonic imaging. However, it is not easy for the MV beamformer to be implemented into a real time diagnostic system, because it requires too many computations for covariance matrix inversion. We introduce a transform-based adaptive beamforming algorithm for ultrasound medical imaging where the transformation can reduce the dimension of the covariance matrix in estimating beamformation weights. Moreover, it is shown that beamformation result can be directly calculated in the transformed domain. Experimental results indicate that our beamforming method shows better resolution and contrast under a real phantom and in-vivo environment.