Coherent Plane Wave Compounding Combined With Tensor Completion Applied for Ultrafast Imaging

To solve the problem of resolution and contrast in plane wave imaging (PWI), coherent plane wave compounding (CPWC) was introduced, in which scanning was performed at different angles, which can achieve the desired image quality by combining the images obtained from PWI at different angles. However, the application of this idea reduces the frame rate in proportion to the number of plane waves (PWs) or angles, so that in this modality, when dealing with some applications such as shear wave imaging (SWI) and strain imaging, there is always a compromise between the frame rate and the image quality. Tensor completion (TC) is a powerful technique to recover missing information of a low-rank tensor from limited observations based on rank minimization. In this article, we present an idea based on TC to make this compromise lighter; in other words, with a smaller number of angles, we can achieve the desired quality of the output image. To evaluate the proposed idea, plane wave imaging challenge in medical ultrasound (PICMUS) datasets was used, which were recorded at 75 different angles. The results of the resolution evaluation showed that using 20% of the coherent PWs and reconstructing other 80% by TC, compared with the situation of using only 20% of the coherent PWs provided a resolution improvement of 14.97% and 17.4% in the simulated and experimental point targets, respectively. Also, the results of the contrast investigation showed that the contrast ratio (CR) improved by 72.6%, 62.9%, and 111.4% in the simulated cyst target data, experimental cyst targets, and
in vivo
carotid cross section, respectively. The results confirmed that using 20% of the coherent PWs and reconstructing other 80% by TC, the image quality is very close to that obtained by considering all 75 angles, so that the difference in resolution is less than 2% and the difference in contrast to noise ratio (CNR) is less than 5 dB. Therefore, with this idea, it can be said that less compromise is needed; in other words, despite having a higher frame rate, an acceptable quality can be achieved.