Radial homomorphic deconvolution of B-mode medical ultrasound images

Describes how homomorphic deconvolution can be used to improve the radial resolution of in vitro and in vivo medical ultrasound images. Each of the recorded radiofrequency ultrasound beams used to form the image was considered as a finite depth sequence of length N, and was weighted with the same exponential depth sequence to create at least some minimum phase sequences. The mean value at each depth sample of the complex cepstrum sequences was computed, and the low depth portion of this mean sequence was taken as the complex cepstrum representation of the ultrasound pulse. It was transformed back to the Fourier frequency domain, and was used to compute the deconvolved echo depth sequence. The method gave substantial improvement in the radial resolution of B-scan images of a tissue mimicking phantom and of human tissues in vivo without significant amplification of the image noise.