Short-lag spatial coherence imaging using minimum variance beamforming on dual apertures.

BACKGROUND: Short-lag spatial coherence (SLSC) imaging, a newly proposed ultrasound imaging scheme, can offer a higher lesion detectability than conventional B-mode imaging. It requires a high focusing quality which can be satisfied by the synthetic aperture imaging mode. However, traditional nonadaptive synthesis for the SLSC still offers an unsatisfactory resolution. The spatial coherence estimation on the receive aperture cannot fully utilize the coherence information in two-dimensional (2D) echo data. METHODS: To overcome these drawbacks, an improved SLSC scheme with adaptive synthesis on dual apertures is proposed in this paper. The minimum variance (MV) beamformer is applied in synthesizing both the receiving and transmitting apertures, while the SLSC function is estimated on both apertures as well. In this way, the resolution is enhanced by the MV implementation, while the coherence in dual apertures is fully utilized. RESULTS: Simulations, phantom experiments, and in vivo studies are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the best performance in terms of the contrast ratio (CR), contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), and the speckle signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Specifically, compared with the delay-and-sum (DAS) method, the proposed method achieves 42.5% higher CR, 412.7% higher CNR, and 402.9% higher speckle SNR in simulations. The resolution is also better than the DAS and conventional SLSC beamformers. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed method is a promising technique for improving the SLSC imaging quality and can provide better visualization for medical diagnosis.

Short-lag Spatial Coherence Ultrasound Imaging with Adaptive Synthetic Transmit Aperture Focusing.

The short-lag spatial coherence (SLSC) imaging has been demonstrated to be advantageous over the traditional B-mode ultrasound imaging. With focused scanning beams, the SLSC imaging has an excellent performance in clutter reduction and lesion detection, especially in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scenarios. The synthetic aperture (SA) imaging is an appropriate mode for the SLSC imaging as the dynamic transmit focusing could keep a good focusing quality at any depth. However, the SLSC image may still suffer a bad resolution performance when a low lag value is used in the coherence summation to ensure the contrast enhancement. In this paper, an adaptive synthetic transmit (Tx) aperture focusing strategy is proposed for the SLSC imaging with the SA mode. Based on the achievements of adaptive beamforming, a minimum variance beamformer is applied in the Tx aperture to realize adaptive focusing. Spatial coherence is then measured in the receive aperture to form the SLSC image. Simulation and experimental studies were conducted to evaluate the proposed method. Experiments showed that the proposed method not only improved the poor resolution of the original SLSC image but also enhanced the speckle performance, which led to increased contrast-to-noise ratio and speckle SNR values.

Mitigating skin tone bias in linear array in vivo photoacoustic imaging with short-lag spatial coherence beamforming.

Photoacoustic (PA) imaging has the potential to deliver non-invasive diagnostic information. However, skin tone differences bias PA target visualization, as the elevated optical absorption of melanated skin decreases optical fluence within the imaging plane and increases the presence of acoustic clutter. This paper demonstrates that short-lag spatial coherence (SLSC) beamforming mitigates this bias. PA data from the forearm of 18 volunteers were acquired with 750-, 810-, and 870-nm wavelengths. Skin tones ranging from light to dark were objectively quantified using the individual typology angle (ITA°). The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the radial artery (RA) and surrounding clutter were measured. Clutter was minimal (e.g., -16 dB relative to the RA) with lighter skin tones and increased to -8 dB with darker tones, which compromised RA visualization in conventional PA images. SLSC beamforming achieved a median SNR improvement of 3.8 dB, resulting in better RA visualization for all skin tones.

Short-lag spatial coherence combined with eigenspace-based minimum variance beamformer for synthetic aperture ultrasound imaging.

Recently, short-lag spatial coherence (SLSC) imaging has been widely studied to improve image contrast and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) in ultrasound imaging. Nevertheless, SLSC is unable to provide a good imaging resolution. Eigenspace-based minimum variance (ESBMV) beamformer was previously devised to promote imaging resolution, while enhancing imaging contrast. However, ESBMV will cause black-spot artifact problem under a high threshold of eigenvalues. Given their complementary properties, in this study, we propose an imaging method with synthetic aperture (SA) ultrasound imaging by combining SLSC weighting (SLSCw) and ESBMV, to improve imaging quality at all depth. Based on the spatial coherence of different sources, adaptive threshold of eigenvalues is designed for ESBMV. In the proposed method, receive aperture data are directly summed to get the receive aperture synthesized data, and then SLSC and ESBMV are applied in transmit aperture based on the receive synthesized data. After that, the estimated SLSC value is adopted as a weighting factor for ESBMV beamforming output. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method based on simulated and experimental data. The results show that the proposed method can not only achieve satisfactory improvement in resolution and contrast but also remove the black-spot artifacts.