Filtered Delay Multiply and Sum beamforming in plane-wave ultrasound imaging: Tests on simulated and experimental data

Plane-wave ultrasound imaging allows achieving very high frame rates in the order of kHz, as an entire image can be acquired using a single plane-wave transmission. Unfortunately, image quality is significantly reduced by the lack of transmit focusing. To mitigate this problem, the frames acquired by transmitting several plane waves with different steering angles can be coherently compounded, but at the expense of the frame rate. In this paper, we investigate the use of Filtered Delay Multiply And Sum (F-DMAS) non-linear beamforming together with plane-wave imaging and coherent compounding, by analyzing its performance in terms of spatial resolution, contrast and speckle quality. Tests carried out on both simulated and experimentally acquired datasets, provided by the Plane-wave Imaging Competition in medical UltraSound (PICMUS), show improved contrast resolution performance of F-DMAS compared to Delay And Sum (DAS).