Joint Subarray Coherence and Minimum Variance Beamformer for Multitransmission Ultrasound Imaging Modalities

Multitransmission modalities, such as plane wave compounding and synthetic aperture imaging, are promising techniques for ultrafast ultrasound imaging. Adaptive beamformers have been proposed to improve the imaging quality. Two common categories of adaptive beamformers are the minimum variance (MV)-based beamformers and the coherence factor (CF)-based beamformers. The MV can significantly improve the resolution while lacking robustness. It is also computationally expensive for multitransmission modalities. The CF can increase the contrast while over-suppressing some desired signals. In this paper, we propose a novel beamformer for better imaging quality in multitransmission ultrasound modalities. Specifically, the MV weighting process is applied to the receiving and transmitting beamforming. The spatial smoothing technique is modified for both dimensions to enhance the robustness. Then, the CF-based weights are calculated using the MV beamformed output. The submatrix technique is also used in the CF process to avoid over-suppression. Simulations and experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results show that it can preserve the high resolution of MV and the high contrast of CF. Compared with the traditional compounding method, the full-width at half-maximum is smaller and the contrast ratio is significantly increased. Anatomic structures of an in vivo human carotid artery are more distinguishable. Because of the spatial smoothing in both dimensions, the proposed beamformer also has high robustness against the channel noise and sound velocity errors.