In vivo application of SLSC imaging in human liver

The ability of an ultrasound system to differentiate signals in the presence of clutter is of key clinical importance. There are several sources of clutter but assessing their relative importance and developing methods of reducing them remain areas of active research. We have developed a novel method called short-lag-spatial-coherence (SLSC) imaging that is based purely on the spatial coherence of the backscattered echoes and has a potential to suppress clutter. We compare matched SLSC and B-mode images beamformed from the individual-channel data acquired on human liver in vivo. While all of the SLSC images have higher contrast and CNR then their B-mode counterparts highest improvements can be observed for poor quality fundamental B-mode images that are overwhelmed with acoustic noise.