Effects of phase aberration correction methods on the minimum variance beamformer

Gustavo R. Chau, Jeremy J. Dahl, Roberto J. Lavarello

Producción científica: Capítulo del libro/informe/acta de congresoContribución a la conferenciarevisión exhaustiva

2 Citas (Scopus)

Resumen

The minimum variance (MV) beamformer is a method that has the potential to enhance the resolution and contrast of ultrasound images. However, it suffers from sensitivity to speed of sound errors and aberration. Although there have been several studies on the application of phase aberration correction (PAC) methods to conventional delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming, the benefits of PAC methods in mitigating the effects of phase aberration in MV beamformed images are not well understood. A study of this type would be helpful in designing a robust beamformer based on PAC knowledge present in the literature. This study analyzes three PAC algorithms (multi-lag cross-correlation, Rigby's beamsum and scaled covariance matrix) and their impact on the performance of the MV beamformer in the presence of second order phase aberrations. The PAC methods in combination with the MV beamformer were tested on simulated and experimental data corrupted with an electronically created near field phase aberrator. It is shown that all gains in performance of the MV beamformer with respect to DAS is lost at high aberration strengths. For instance, at 60 ns of aberration the lateral resolution of DAS degrades by 22% while MV degrades by 600%. It is also shown that basic PAC methods improve the aberrated MV beamformer. PAC methods reduces degradation in lateral resolution from 600% to 5%. Similar improvements are observed in peak sidelobe level (96% to 27%), contrast (88% to 49% for the simulations and 43% to 15% for experiments) and contrast-to-noise ratio (86% to 42% for the simulations and 68% to 55% for experiments). These enhancements allow the MV beamformer to outperform DAS even in the strongest aberration case.

Idioma originalInglés
Título de la publicación alojada2016 38th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2016
EditorialInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Páginas3231-3234
Número de páginas4
ISBN (versión digital)9781457702204
DOI
EstadoPublicada - 13 oct. 2016
Evento38th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2016 - Orlando, Estados Unidos
Duración: 16 ago. 201620 ago. 2016

Serie de la publicación

NombreProceedings of the Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBS
Volumen2016-October
ISSN (versión impresa)1557-170X

Conferencia

Conferencia38th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2016
País/TerritorioEstados Unidos
CiudadOrlando
Período16/08/1620/08/16

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