Two-Dimensional Spatial Coherence for Ultrasonic DMAS Beamforming in Multi-Angle Plane-Wave Imaging

Ultrasonic multi-angle plane-wave (PW) coherent compounding relies on delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming of two-dimensional (2D) echo matrix in both the dimensions PW transmit angle and receiving channel to construct each image pixel. Due to the characteristics of DAS beamforming, PW coherent compounding may suffer from high image clutter when the number of transmit angles is kept low for ultrafast image acquisition. Delay-multiply-and-sum (DMAS) beamforming exploits the spatial coherence of the receiving aperture to suppress clutter interference. Previous attempts to introduce DMAS beamforming into multi-angle PW imaging has been reported but only in either dimension of the 2D echo matrix. In this study, a novel DMAS operation is proposed to extract the 2D spatial coherence of echo matrix for further improvement of image quality. The proposed 2D-DMAS method relies on a flexibly tunable p value to manipulate the signal coherence in the beamforming output. For p = 2.0 as an example, simulation results indicate that 2D-DMAS outperforms other one-dimensional DMAS methods by at least 9.3 dB in terms of ghost-artifact suppression. Experimental results also show that 2D-DMAS provides the highest improvement in lateral resolution by 32% and in image contrast by 15.6 dB relative to conventional 2D-DAS beamforming. Nonetheless, since 2D-DMAS emphasizes signal coherence more than its one-dimensional DMAS counterparts, it suffers from the most elevated speckle variation and the granular pattern in the tissue background.