Iteratively-reweighted beamforming for high-resolution ultrasound imaging

Mahurkar, AG and Pokala, P and Seelamantula, CS (2019) Iteratively-reweighted beamforming for high-resolution ultrasound imaging. In: 16th IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, ISBI 2019, 8 - 11 April 2019, Venice, pp. 1745-1748.

PDF ISBI_2019.pdf - Published Version Restricted to Registered users only Download (9MB) | Request a copy

Abstract

Ultrasound imaging typically employs delay-and-sum (DAS) beamformers for image reconstruction. An apodization window is typically used to suppress the beam-pattern's sidelobes. This approach introduces a trade-off between the mainlobe width versus the sidelobe attenuation and therefore offers limited performance. We consider a statistical framework for beamforming and present two variants. In the first one, the signal of interest is modeled as a Laplacian distributed random variable and the interference is modeled as additive and Gaussian distributed. A closed-form solution is obtained to this optimization problem. In the second variant, we propose an iteratively-reweighted (IR) beamforming algorithm, which solves a constrained optimization problem to determine the optimal apodization weights. This beamformer results in a sharper mainlobe that translates to a finer lateral resolution. The proposed method is compared with the standard DAS beamformer and a recently proposed statistically modeled beamformer, namely iMAP for different number of plane-wave (PW) insonifications. This algorithm is independent of the imaging modality employed and exhibits a superior performance in terms of lateral resolution.

Item Type:	Conference Paper
Publication:	Proceedings - International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging
Publisher:	IEEE Computer Society
Additional Information:	The copyright for this article belongs to IEEE Computer Society
Keywords:	Constrained optimization; Economic and social effects; Image reconstruction; Iterative methods; Medical imaging; Ultrasonic imaging, Apodizations; Beamforming algorithms; High resolution; Statistical modeling; Ultrasound imaging, Beamforming
Department/Centre:	Division of Electrical Sciences > Electrical Engineering
Date Deposited:	30 Nov 2022 10:04
Last Modified:	30 Nov 2022 10:04
URI:	https://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/78339

Actions (login required)

View Item