Inverse Problem of Ultrasound Beamforming With Denoising-Based Regularized Solutions

During the past few years, inverse problem formulations of ultrasound beamforming have attracted growing interest. They usually pose beamforming as a minimization problem of a fidelity term resulting from the measurement model plus a regularization term that enforces a certain class on the resulting...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control ferroelectrics, and frequency control, 2022-10, Vol.69 (10), p.2906-2916
Main Authors: Goudarzi, Sobhan, Basarab, Adrian, Rivaz, Hassan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustics
Algorithms
Array signal processing
Beamforming
Engineering Sciences
Image contrast
Image quality
Image reconstruction
In vivo methods and tests
inverse problem
Inverse problems
Noise reduction
plug-and-play (PnP)
Probes
Regularization
regularization by denoising (RED)
Ultrasonic imaging
Ultrasonic testing
ultrasound imaging
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Summary:During the past few years, inverse problem formulations of ultrasound beamforming have attracted growing interest. They usually pose beamforming as a minimization problem of a fidelity term resulting from the measurement model plus a regularization term that enforces a certain class on the resulting image. Here, we take advantage of alternating direction method of multipliers to propose a flexible framework in which each term is optimized separately. Furthermore, the proposed beamforming formulation is extended to replace the regularization term with a denoising algorithm, based on the recent approaches called plug-and-play (PnP) and regularization by denoising (RED). Such regularizations are shown in this work to better preserve speckle texture, an important feature in ultrasound imaging, than sparsity-based approaches previously proposed in the literature. The efficiency of the proposed methods is evaluated on simulations, real phantoms, and in vivo data available from a plane-wave imaging challenge in medical ultrasound. Furthermore, a comprehensive comparison with existing ultrasound beamforming methods is also provided. These results show that the RED algorithm gives the best image quality in terms of contrast index while preserving the speckle statistics.
ISSN:0885-3010
1525-8955
DOI:10.1109/TUFFC.2022.3198874