Speckle noise is a phenomenon inherent in any coherent imaging process and decreases the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which brings down the imaging quality. Speckle noise reduction is particularly important in the tissue harmonic imaging (THI) since it has the lower energy and the poorer SNR than the fundamental imaging (FI). Recently plane wave imaging (PWI) has been widely explored. Since the entire imaging region can be covered in one emission, the frame rate increases greatly. In PWI, speckle can be reduced by incoherently averaging images with different speckle patterns. Such images can be acquired by varying the angle from which a target is imaged (spatial compounding, SC) or by changing the spectrum of the pulse (frequency compounding, FC). In this paper we demonstrate here that each approach is only a partial solution and that combining them provides a better result than applying either approach separately. We propose a spatial-frequency compounding (SFC) method for THI. The new method brings a good speckle suppression result. To illustrate the performance of our method, experiments have been conducted on the simulated data. A nonlinear simulation platform based on the full-wave model is used in the harmonic imaging simulation. Results show that our method brings the SNR an improvement of up to 50% in comparison with the single frame HI while maintaining a far better performance in both terms of resolution and contrast than the FI. Similar results can be obtained from our further experiments.

Date Published: 9 December 2015
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 9817, Seventh International Conference on Graphic and Image Processing (ICGIP 2015), 981719 (9 December 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2227980

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9817:
Seventh International Conference on Graphic and Image Processing (ICGIP 2015)
Yulin Wang; Xudong Jiang, Editor(s)