An improved spatio-temporally smoothed coherence factor combined with eigenspace-based minimum variance beamformer for plane-wave imaging in medical ultrasound

Plane-wave imaging plays a highly significant role o wing to the special demand for high frame rate, however, its po or image quality hinders its application in ultrasound industrie s. Many scholars have attempted to give a wide variety of soluti ons to improve the image quality, however, each of them has li mitations or compromises. In this study, we improve the spatio -temporally smoothed factor beamformer by introducing an ad justable factor to adaptively assign some special imaging param eters, and then combine eigen space-based minimum variance beamformer into our method, aiming to further improve the im age quality. Simulated and experimental datasets demonstrate that the proposed methods could improve the robustness of alg orithm with speckle pattern consistency and markedly remove the artifacts, while preserving effective ability to suppress clutt er and side-lobes.