Adaptive diagonal loaded minimum variance beamforming applied to medical ultrasound imaging

In order to enhance the robustness and contrast in the minimum variance(MV) beamformer, adaptive diagonal loading method was proposed. The conventional diagonal loading technique has already been used in the MV beamformer, but has the drawback that its level is specified by predefined parameter and without consideration of input-data. To alleviate this problem, the level of diagonal loading was computed appropriately and automatically from the given data by shrinkage method in the proposed adaptive diagonal loaded beamformer. The performance of the proposed beamformer was tested on the simulated point target and cyst phantom was obtained using Field II. In the point target simulation, it is shown that the proposed method has higher lateral resolution than the conventional delay-and-sum beamformer and could be more robust in estimating the amplitude peak than the MV beamformer when acoustic velocity error exists. In the cyst phantom simulation, the proposed beamformer has shown that it achieves an improvement in contrast ratio and without distorting the edges of cyst.