An adaptive imaging method for ultrasound coherent plane-wave compounding based on the polar coherence factor

Abstract

Coherent Plane-Wave Compounding (CPWC) is a compromise between the frame rate and image quality after a single plane wave imaging, which emits plane waves at different angles to form a backscattered signal through the target, and then forms an image by superimposing it. Although this technology effectively improves the imaging quality, the unfocused nature of the plane waves leads to a strong coherence, especially when the two angles are similar, the artifacts in the image become more obvious. Therefore, this paper proposes a method of coherent plane-wave compounding based on the polar coherence factor (PCF), which takes the imaging results of plane waves at different angles as the weighting object, and then calculates the PCF factor. Finally, multiply the PCF factor and the result is the final weighted pixel value. The experimental results show that the PCF-CPWC algorithm greatly improves the resolution and contrast of the image, and it has better imaging quality.