Estimating Mean Speed-of-Sound from Sequence-Dependent Geometric Disparities

• In ultrasound beamforming, focusing time delays are typically computed with a spatially constant speed-of-sound (SoS) assumption. A mismatch between beamforming and true medium SoS then leads to aberration artifacts. Other imaging techniques such as spatially-resolved SoS reconstruction using tomographic techniques also rely on a good SoS estimate for initial beamforming. In this work, we exploit spatially-varying geometric disparities in the transmit and receive paths of multiple sequences for estimating a mean medium SoS. We use images from diverging waves beamformed with an assumed SoS, and propose a model fitting method for estimating the SoS offset. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method for tomographic SoS reconstruction. With corrected beamforming SoS, the reconstruction accuracy on simulated data was improved by 63% and 29%, respectively, for an initial SoS over- and under-estimation of 1.5%. We further demonstrate our proposed method on a breast phantom, indicating substantial improvement in contrast-to-noise ratio for local SoS mapping.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Signalbehandling (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Signal Processing (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Beamforming

speed-of-sound imaging

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)