Coherent Beam-forming Combined with Wiener Filter in Ultrasound Imaging

The traditional ultrasonic dynamic focusing imaging which simply uses the delay-and-sum method in beamforming shows low resolution and poor contrast. In this study, based on the coherent pixel-based beamforming (Coherent PB), a novel Wiener pre-filter with high computational efficiency is applied to correct the phase of the entire array signal by using the pulse-echo at the focal point. We also apply a Wiener post-filter calculating adaptive weights for the beamforming results of each sub-aperture to suppress the noise and artifacts. The proposed method's effectiveness is verified through simulation experiments, phantom experiments, and in vivo experiments. Compared with Coherent PB, the proposed method significantly improves the axial resolution and contrast of images while maintaining the high lateral resolution and computational efficiency, which shows certain clinical application value.