Plane wave compounding based on a joint transmitting-receiving adaptive beamformer.

Plane wave compounding is a useful mode for ultrasound imaging because it can make a good compromise between imaging quality and frame rate. It is also useful for broad view ultrasound imaging. Traditional coherent plane wave compounding coherently sums the echo data of different steered transmitting waves as the output. The data correlation information of different emissions is not considered. Therefore, some adaptive techniques can be introduced into the compounding procedure. In this paper, we propose a Joint Transmitting-Receiving (JTR) adaptive beamforming scheme for plane wave compounding. Unlike traditional adaptive beamformers, the proposed beamforming scheme is designed for the 2-D data set obtained from multiple plane wave firings. It calculates both the transmitting aperture weights and the receiving aperture weights and then combines them into a 2-D adaptive weight function for compounding. Experiments are conducted on both simulated and phantom data. Results show that the proposed scheme has better performance on both point targets and cysts than the existing plane wave compounding approach. Because of the adaptive process in both apertures for compounding, an improved resolution is observed in both simulation and phantom studies. When the eigenanalysis is introduced, a contrast enhancement is achieved. For the simulated cyst, a contrast ratio (CR) improvement of 48% is achieved compared with the traditional plane wave compounding. For the phantom cyst, this improvement is 213.8%. The proposed scheme also has good robustness against sound velocity errors. Therefore, it is effective in enhancing the coherent plane wave compounding quality.