Reverberation clutter is a difficult source of image degradation in patients, and minimum variance (MV) in particular is poorly equipped to handle such sources, as we demonstrate here. We propose that a pre-processing step such as ADMIRE should be implemented in cases with high reverberation clutter when we still want to be able to implement MV to realize improvements in lateral resolution. The ADMIRE, or aperture domain model image reconstruction, method is specifically designed to suppress or eliminate reverberant and off-axis sources of clutter while returning the decluttered channel data with its original dimensionality, allowing us to sequentially process the data with MV. We show that in simulated data this combined method results in clear improvements to image quality, contrast ratio, and target boundary thickness compared to DAS and MV alone. In in vivo cases, contrast ratio and general image quality are improved, and boundary thickness is generally on par with DAS and MV.
|