Coherent Plane-wave Compounding with Double-Stage Delay Multiply and Sum Beamforming in Ultrasound Imaging: Simulation Study

Plane-wave imaging (PWI) is a best way to improve the frame rate in ultrasound imaging. However, due to the lack of transmit focus in PWI, the image quality is poor. A novel coherent plane-wave compounding (CPWC) was proposed to handle this issue, but the increased plane waves (PWs) reduced the frame rate. Thus, we combine a novel Double-Stage Delay Multiply and Sum (DS-DMAS) beamformer, which is shown to be better to improve the image quality, with plane-wave compounding to analyze the performance in terms of resolution and contrast. The simulation tests are carried out to show that applying DS-DMAS beamformer can achieve better results even if the number of transmitted PWs are decreased.