A Novel Minimum Variance Beamformer and Its Circuit Design for Ultrasound Beamforming

This paper describes new approaches to minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamforming for coherent plane-wave compounding (CPWC) in ultrasound imaging. Imaging results based on actual received and simulated waveforms show improvements over the traditional Delay and Sum (DAS) method as well as other MVDR-based methods, in terms of spatial and contrast resolutions. We designed detail circuits that can be configured to implement several of the aforementioned ultrasound beamforming methods effectively. The simulated operating frequency for the circuits implemented in FPGA is up to 62. 5MHz.