Adaptive beamforming applied to medical ultrasound imaging
Adaptive beamforming applied to medical ultrasound imaging
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DOI：
10.1109/tuffc.2007.431
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发表时间：
2007-08-01
影响因子：
3.6
通讯作者：
Holm, Sverre
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Synnevag, Johan-Fredrik;Austeng, Andreas;Holm, Sverre
我们已经将最小方差（MV）自适应波束形成器应用于医学超声成像，与延迟求和（DAS）相比，图像质量有了显着改善。我们证明了减少主瓣宽度和抑制旁瓣的模拟和实验RF数据的紧密间隔的线目标，这使得潜在的对比度和分辨率增强医学图像。该方法适用于实验RF数据从心脏幻影，在其中，我们表现出更高的分辨率和更好的定义的心室壁。自适应波束形成器的一个潜在弱点是对假设波场参数中的误差敏感。我们看两种方法来增加所提出的方法的鲁棒性;空间平滑和对角加载。我们表明，两者都是由一个单一的参数，可以移动的性能从MV波束形成器的DAS波束形成器。我们评估速度误差的敏感性，并表明，可靠的幅度估计实现，而主瓣宽度和旁瓣电平仍然显着低于传统的波束形成器。
We have applied the minimum variance (MV) adaptive beamformer to medical ultrasound imaging and shown significant improvement in image quality compared to delay-and-sum (DAS). We demonstrate reduced mainlobe width and suppression of sidelobes on both simulated and experimental RF data of closely spaced wire targets, which gives potential contrast and resolution enhancement in medical images. The method is applied to experimental RF data from a heart phantom, in which we show increased resolution and improved definition of the ventricular walls. A potential weakness of adaptive beamformers is sensitivity to errors in the assumed wavefield parameters. We look at two ways to increase robustness of the proposed method; spatial smoothing and diagonal loading. We show that both are controlled by a single parameter that can move the performance from that of a MV beamformer to that of a DAS beamformer. We evaluate the sensitivity to velocity errors and show that reliable amplitude estimates are achieved while the mainlobe width and sidelobe levels are still significantly lower than for the conventional beamformer.