An adaptive ultrasound sound speed optimization based on image contrast analysis / 生物医学工程学杂志

ABSTRACT

In order to get real time ultrasound images with clear structure and improved contrast, an adaptive ultrasound sound speed optimization method based on image contrast analysis was investigated. It firstly introduced the dynamic beamforming of ultrasound system, as well as the definition of assumed system's sound speed and the true sound speed propagated in tissues the degrade image quality due to their mismatch was also discussed. After given the pixel gray level value based ultrasound image contrast ratio, the basic idea to precisely estimate the true sound speed for real time system sound speed was proposed. Algorithms have been verified both in tissue-mimicking phantoms with known sound speeds and in vivo ultrasound images, compared with other existing method. The testing results showed that this new method not only produced accurate sound speed for ultrasound image optimization, but also finely met the critical computation requirement for real time applications.