Background Speckle improvement of Double-StageDelay-Multiply-and-Sum

Among all the medical imaging modalities,Ultrasound Imaging (UI) is widely used due to its cost-efficiencyand safety. However, one of the main impediments of thismodality is its poor image quality. Thus, various beamformingtechniques have been proposed to compensate for this issue.Delay-and-Sum (DAS) beamformer is a commonly usedalgorithm because of its simplicity. Its reconstructed imagessuffer from poor resolution and contrast. Recently, the FilteredDelay-Multiply-and-Sum (F-DMAS) beamformer wassuggested to provide better image quality than the DASbeamformer. Moreover, Double-Stage DMAS (DS-DMAS)technique leads to lower sidelobes in comparison with F-DMAS.Additionally, Short-Lag DMAS (SL-DMAS) beamformer hasprovided new insights into the relation between the performanceof the F-DMAS algorithm and the spatial-coherence ofbackscattered signals.In this work, we combined the last two mentionedbeamformers. The proposed method, entitled "Double Stage-Short Lag DMAS (DS SL-DMAS)," was evaluated numericallyand experimentally. In order to collect dataset and assess theperformance of the mentioned beamformer, field ii toolbox wasused. Also, Point-Spread-Function and cyst phantoms were usedto compare the mentioned techniques. The quantitative resultsindicate that DS SL-DMAS leads to ۳۳\%, ۱۱\%, ۳\% and ۱۴\%improvement in Full Width at Half-Maximum (at ۵۰mm),contrast to noise ratio, generalized contrast to noise ratio, andcontrast ratio, respectively, compared to the F-DMASbeamformer.

کلیدواژه ها:

Ultrasound ، Beamforming ، Short-Lag Double-Stage Delay-Multiply-and-Sum ، sidelobes rejection ، resolutionenhancement ، contrast improvement