A New Nonlinear Compounding Technique for Ultrasound B-mode Medical Imaging

Compounding techniques have been used in ultra-fast ultrasound imaging to improve image quality by reducing clutter noise, smoothing speckle variance and enhancing its spatial resolution at the cost of reducing frame rate. However, the reduction of clutter noise and side lobes inside the anechoic regions is minimal when combining conventional spatial compounding and delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming. Despite the availability of advanced beamforming algorithms such as filtered-delay-multiply-and-sum (FDMAS), its prevalence is hindered by relatively high computational cost. In this study, a new nonlinear compounding technique known as filtered multiply and sum (FMAS) was proposed to improve the B-mode image quality without increasing the overall computational complexity. With three compunding angles, the lateral resolution for DAS-FMAS was improved by 36% and 19% compared to DAS and FDMAS. The proposed DAS-FMAS technique also provided improvements of 14.1 dB and 7.29 dB in contrast ratio than DAS and FDMAS.