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.

Optimization of ultrasonic elastography by coded excitation and transmit-side multi-frequency compounding

To improve the quality of ultrasonic elastography, by taking the advantage of code excitation and frequency compounding, a transmitting-side multi-frequency with coded excitation for elastography （TFCCE） was proposed. TFCCE adopts the chirp signal excitation scheme and strikes a balance in the selection of sub-signal bandwidth, the bandwidth overlap and the number of sub-strain image based on theoretical derivation, so as to further improve the quality of elastic image. Experiments have proved that, compared with the other optimizing methods, the elastographyic signal-to-noise ratio（Re-SN） and contrast-to-noise ratio（Re-CN） are improved significantly with different echo signal-to-noise ratios （ReSN） and attenuation coefficients. When ReSN is 50 dB, compared with short pulse, Rc-SN and Re-CN obtained by TFCCE increase by 53% and 143%, respectively. Moreover, in a deeper investigation （85-95 mm）, the image has lower strain noise and clear details. When the attenuation coefficient is in the range of 0-1 dB/（cm.MHz）, Re-SN and Re-CN obtained by TFCCE can be kept in moderate ranges of 5〈Re-SN〈6.8 and 11.4〈Re-CN〈15.2, respectively. In particular, for higher tissue attenuation, the basic image quality cannot be ensured with short pulse excitation, while mediocre quality strain figure can be obtained by TFCCE. Therefore, the TFCCE technology can effectively improve the elastography quality and can be applied to ultrasonic clinical trials.