Plane-Wave Ultrasound Beamforming Through Independent Component Analysis

Background and Objective: Beamforming in coherent plane-wave compounding (CPWC) is an essential step maintaining high resolution, contrast framerate. Adaptive methods have been designed to achieve this goal by estimating the apodization weights from echo traces acquired several transducer elements. Methods: Herein, we formulate beamforming as a blind source separation problem, where output of each element considered non-independent observation field. As such, can be formulated estimation independent component out observations. We then adapt analysis (ICA) algorithm solve problem reconstruct final image. Results: The proposed method evaluated on set simulations, real phantom, vivo data available imaging challenge medical ultrasound. Moreover, results are compared with other well-known adaptive methods. Conclusions: Results demonstrate that simultaneously improves resolution contrast.