Ultrasound Imaging using Clutter Rejection

Ultrasound images are often contaminated with acoustic clutter, which obscures image details of interest, thus leading to potentially inaccurate medical diagnosis. In this work we have developed a novel method that uses adaptive beamforming with phase coherence processing in order to optimize the desired characteristics of the beam formed signal. The proposed method consists of detecting the strong reflectors beyond the basic resolution of the system and enhancing them by adjusting the focal point in an adaptive manner based on the raw data. The purpose of the phase coherence processing is to obtain integration gain for coherent targets by summing adjacent signals after applying appropriate phases to the baseband signals so that coherent pixels will constructively interfere. The spatial separation between coherent signals from interference signals can be accomplished using an autoregressive model. The reconstruction results of the proposed approach provide improved image quality in terms of resolution, speckled tissue texture, and signal-to-noise ratio compared with state-of-the-art methods.