Improved Coherent Plane-Wave Compounding Using Sign Coherence Factor Weighting for Frequency-Domain Beamforming

This study proposes a novel modified sign coherence factor (SCF) weighting adapted to the frequency-domain (FD) beamforming for ultrasound plane-wave imaging to achieve a high frame rate and better image quality. First, before beamforming, the sign components were extracted from the radiofrequency signals of aperture data. Second, the modified SCF was established using the FD beamformed sign components. Finally, the FD beamformed image was weighted by the modified SCF. To assess the performance of the proposed modified SCF for FD beamforming, the resolution, contrast, computation complexity and execution time of the generated images were evaluated. The results revealed that the FD-SCF could significantly improve the computational load compared with the classic delay-and-sum SCF on the premise of equal image quality improvement. Therefore, high image quality and low computational load have been successfully combined under the proposed weighting method.