343 / 2020-01-12 07:02:00

Delay Multiply and Sum based Selective Compounding for Enhanced Ultrasound Imaging

Ultrasound imaging; beamforming; delay multiply and sum; frequency compounding

IEEE SAM 2020: Full Regular Papers > Array processing for biomedical applications

In ultrasound imaging, a non-linear beamforming algorithm called filtered delay multiply and sum (F-DMAS) has been demonstrated to provide improved contrast and resolution compared to the commonly employed delay and sum (DAS) algorithm. In F-DMAS, the delay compensated radio-frequency (RF) narrowband signals from the transducer channels are pairwise multiplied to generate baseband and higher order harmonic components in the output spectrum. The final image is reconstructed by filtering the second harmonic component to provide better contrast and resolution. However, the rejection of other generated harmonic components would lead to the loss of potential tissue information as these components are also generated from the same tissue. In this work, a modification to F-DMAS is proposed where, the different frequency bands generated through pairwise multiplications are selectively combined through additive or difference compounding techniques to form the final image. The results show that the proposed approach is able to outperform standard F-DMAS in terms of contrast and resolution.