An improved spatio-temporally smoothed coherence factor combined with eigenspace-based minimum variance beamformer for plane-wave imaging in medical ultrasound

Currently there are two main categories of adaptive beamforming applied to medical ultrasound imaging: minimum-variance-related beamforming(MV) and coherence-factor-related beamforming (CF), both of which have been applied to suppress side/granting lobe and clutter for plane-wave imaging. Unfortunately, due to low SNR/SINR, the resulting images may suffer from deficiencies: deteriorated speckle pattern, and/or black-region artifacts surrounding hyperechoic objects. To overcome these problems above, an improved spatio-temporally smoothed coherence factor combined with eigen-space minimum variance procedure is introduced in this study.