Adaptive beamforming in ultrasound imaging with plane wave compounding

Ultrasound plane-wave imaging can achieve the high frame rate but suffers from the image degradation since the beamforming process is restricted only in the receiving mode. Coherent compounding of multi-angle plane waves has been proposed to improve the image quality. It uses multiple plane waves steered at different angles to scan the tissue and then averages the images of different illuminations. If we use adaptive beamformers to get the single-angle image and then compound the images of different transmissions, we can get better results, but the computational cost may be too expensive even when the observation number is small. In this paper, we combine the compounding process with the estimation of the covariance matrix in adaptive beamforming to get a joint beamforming strategy. Results show that the proposed method can get almost the same result as multi-angle adaptive beamforming strategy, while it greatly reduces the computational amount. Thus, it´s a more effective way to obtain ultrasound images by using multiple plane waves.