On improved acoustic resolution for ultrasound imaging

Acoustic imaging exhibits inherent geometric distortions due to variations in sound speed within the body. Additional distortions are missing surfaces, speckle noise, acoustic shadows and resolution inconsistency. These artifacts depend on the positioning of the transducer relative to the scanned organs, and considerably degrade the images obtained. We propose an efficient algorithm that combines ultrasound images taken from different angles using compounding to obtain a quality-enhanced image. The algorithm is iterative. In each step the images are divided into blocks and a matching procedure is performed. The gray level information is translated according to the imaging constraints, resulting in warped acoustic images that function as the input signal to the following iteration. The algorithm was implemented successfully and the results are presented and discussed.