Influence of Ultrasonic Diffusion Attenuation on Adaptive Beamformer

Abstract

In this study, we investigated the amplitude and phase estimation (APES) beamformer, which is one of the adaptive beamformers. In our previous study, the performance of the APES beamformer can be improved significantly by considering the directivity of each element of an ultrasound probe. In the present study, the diffusion attenuation, which is a kind of propagation attenuation loss of the ultrasonic waves, was also taken into account. The performance of the modified APES beamformer, in which such an attenuation characteristic was implemented, was evaluated using a phantom. The spatial resolution and contrast of the conventional APES beamformer were 0.67 mm and 2.1 dB, respectively. Those were improved to 0.26 mm and 4.8 dB by considering the element directivity [1], and those were further improved to 0.24 mm and 5.0 dB by considering diffusion attenuation.References[1] Hasegawa and Kanai, IEEE Trans. UFFC, 2015.