Combined Sign Coherent Factor and Delay Multiply and Sum Beamformer for Plane Wave Imaging

Abstract

Plane wave imaging is a relatively new technique in ultrasound imaging. However, in traditional methods, the coherent information of different emissions and different elements are not considered. In fact, the sign coherent factor (SCF) can improve the lateral resolution of the imaging greatly. In addition, the delay multiply and sum (DMAS) beamformer is mainly based on the spatial correlation of background scattering signals, it has higher contrast and resolution, but suffers from energy loss at great depths. In this paper, combining the advantages of SCF and DMAS, the sign coherent factor delay multiply and sum (SCF-DMAS) beamformer for plane wave imaging is proposed. Unlike the traditional plane wave imaging, the proposed SCF-DMAS beamformer is based on the 2-D echo data set, which improves the imaging speed greatly. Finally, we simulated the point targets and the cyst phantom to evaluate the performance of proposed method. Compared with the traditional plane wave imaging, the lateral resolution of SCF-DMAS beamformer improves greatly for the point targets, and for the cyst phantom the contrast ratio (CR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) increased by 96.97 and by 79.98% respectively without reducing the frame rate.