Adaptive Ultrasound Beamforming Multiplicative Beamforming with Strong Reflectors Separation

The Delay and Sum (DAS) Beamformer suffers from side-lobes artifacts caused by strong reflectors. Algorithms aimed to attenuate these side-lobes require access to the full, pre-beamforming received data, which increases the transmission rate between the ultrasound frontend and backend modules, as well as increasing the power consumption of the ultrasound system. In this work we present a novel approach to this problem by reducing the number of beamforming channels without compromising the overall performance. The CLEAN algorithm (Högbom, 1974) is used to reduce the strong reflectors related artifacts. The proposed method is tested using in-vivo images. Our conclusion is that the new approach can contribute to the design of smaller handheld ultrasound systems with lower power consumption.