Wiener Beamforming and the Coherence Factor in Ultrasound Imaging

作者：Nilsen Carl Inge Colombo^*; Holm Sverre

来源：IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control, 2010, 57(6): 1329-1346.

DOI：10.1109/TUFFC.2010.1553

The coherence factor (CF) is used for aberration correction and sidelobe suppression in ultrasound imaging. Unfortunately, it suffers from artifacts when the SNR is low. We show how the CF can be interpreted as an implementation of the Wiener postfilter for a delay-and-sum beamformer. In addition, we show that a minimum-variance, distortionless-response beamformer followed by CF weighting can be interpreted as an implementation of the Wiener beamformer. These interpretations provide us with a theoretical framework for analyzing and improving CF-based methods. We use this theory to develop more robust implementations for both the Wiener postfilter and beamformer. The performance of these implementations is shown on simulated and real data.

• 出版日期2010-6