Frequency-space prediction filtering for acoustic clutter and random noise attenuation in ultrasound imaging

Frequency-space prediction filtering (FXPF), also known as FX deconvolution, is a technique originally developed for random noise attenuation in seismic imaging. FXPF attempts to reduce random noise in seismic data by modeling only real signals that appear as linear or quasilinear events in the aperture domain. In medical ultrasound imaging, channel radio frequency (RF) signals from the main lobe appear as horizontal events after receive delays are applied while acoustic clutter signals from off-axis scatterers and electronic noise do not. Therefore, FXPF is suitable for preserving only the main-lobe signals and attenuating the unwanted contributions from clutter and random noise in medical ultrasound imaging. We adapt FXPF to ultrasound imaging, and evaluate its performance using simulated data sets from a point target and an anechoic cyst. Our simulation results show that using only 5 iterations of FXPF achieves contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) improvements of 67 % in a simulated noise-free anechoic cyst and 228 % in a simulated anechoic cyst contaminated with random noise of 15 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Our findings suggest that ultrasound imaging with FXPF attenuates contributions from both acoustic clutter and random noise and therefore, FXPF has great potential to improve ultrasound image contrast for better visualization of important anatomical structures and detection of diseased conditions.