Adaptive time corrected gain for ultrasound through time-varying Wiener deconvolution

Ultrasound testing techniques, either nondestructive (NDT) or medical, suffer from spatial signal attenuation, where equivalent scatterers at different distances from the transducer will display different signal amplitudes. If not corrected, these differences may lead to erroneously interpretation. In NDT, Time Corrected Gain (TCG) compensates for spatial attenuation by increasing input gain according to the expected attenuation. Because TCG does not consider noise, signals coming from far scatterers are highly amplified, and so is noise. Wiener filter, on the other hand, deal with noise optimally, but does not compensate for spatial attenuation. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive TCG that combines the amplitude correction of the TCG with the optimality of the Wiener filter. We present simulations to evaluate the robustness of the proposed technique, as well as real-word results showing the proposed method is superior to both Wiener filter and classical TCG independently.