Comparison of cepstrum-based methods for radial blind deconvolution of ultrasound images

This paper compares the performance of seven different cepstrum-based methods for radial blind deconvolution of medical ultrasound images. The first is the generalized cepstrum method. The second is the spectral root cepstrum method. These methods have received little attention so far. The last five methods are all based on the complex cepstrum, but different computational techniques in the spatial and frequency domain are employed. Using in vivo radio frequency data from a clinical scanner, the generalized cepstrum method gave the best images closely followed by the complex cepstrum using phase unwrapping or polynomial rooting. The complex cepstrum method using higher-order statistics was ranked as low as number five. These results are an important guideline for selecting a specific cepstrum-based radial deconvolution method for implementation in ultrasound scanners.