Two-Dimensional Mean Adaptive Zero-Crossing Factor Weighted Ultrasound Plane Wave Imaging

In this paper, a two-dimensional mean adaptive zero-crossing factor (TMAZF) is proposed to enhance the contrast ratio and resolution of the images generated by coherent plane-wave compounding (CPWC). TMAZF determines the zero-crossing point based on the polarity of the plane wave imaging results and adaptively adjusts the length of the subarrays, then calculates the average values using the two-dimensional mean filter. It can restrain noise and maintain the background speckle pattern. The performance of the proposed method is verified by simulations and experiments. The datasets processing results show that this method can effectively improve the contrast ratio and resolution than traditional CPWC. To analyze the quality of imaging results quantitatively, TMAZF is compared with traditional CPWC, coherence factor weighted CPWC and generalized coherence factor weighted CPWC in this paper. For simulated cyst images and carotid artery images in vivo, the contrast ratio of TMAZF has been greatly improved. Besides, in the experimental data, the contrast-to-noise ratio and speckle signal-to-noise ratio of TMAZF also have obvious advantages over those of other methods and show good potential in practical application.