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Mean-Squared Error Beamforming for Coherent Plane-Wave Compounding

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Conference Object

Change log

Authors

Nguyen, NQ 
Prager, RW 

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to implement a new minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) beamformer for coherent plane-wave compounding. In ultrasound imaging, an beamformer, in the MMSE approach, is usually derived as a multiplication of the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) output and a scalar, which is approximated by the coherent factor (CF). Beside the spatial smoothing adopted for estimating the data covariance matrix in MVDR beamforming, this approximation could be another factor that potentially reduces performance of the MMSE. In this paper, we extend the spatial coherent approach that we developed previously for MVDR beamforming, and show how this scalar can be estimated through an array of MVDR outputs. Advances of the proposed MMSE are evaluated on datasets available on PICMUS website. The imaging results show it offers improvements, in terms of spatial and contrast resolution, over the corresponding MVDR and a combination of MVDR beamforming and CF in the literature.

Description

Keywords

ultrasound, beamforming, minimum variance, minimum mean-squared error, image quality

Journal Title

IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium, IUS

Conference Name

2019 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium (IUS)

Journal ISSN

1948-5719
1948-5727

Volume Title

2019-October

Publisher

IEEE

Rights

All rights reserved
Sponsorship
Department of Engineering