Abstract:
Ultrasonic plane wave imaging is a widely used ultra-fast ultrasonic imaging method in recent years. The composite multi-angle plane wave imaging improves the imaging quality under the condition of slight loss rate. However, the common multi-angle coherent plane wave compounding (CPWC) method simply compounds data after delay and sum (DAS) of multiple angles, without considering the correlations of the data in a single angle and between multiple angles. In this paper, a plane wave imaging method combining spatial and angular sign coherence factors (asSCF) is proposed. The spatial sign coherence factor and the angular sign coherence factor are integrated into the beamforming process, and the correlation between signals is fully considered in order to improve the quality of multiangle composite imaging. The simulation experiment, imitation experiments and in vivo tissue experiment are carried out to compare the imaging effects of asSCF-CPWC method with the single sign coherence factor method and the traditional CPWC method. The results show that the asSCF-CPWC method has better lateral resolution and better imaging contrast.