Plane Wave Ultrasound Imaging Under Low Signal-to-Noise Ratio Circumstances with Delay Multiply and Sum and Chirp-Coded Excitation

Delay and Sum (DAS) beamforming is a conventional but non-adaptive method for ultrasound imaging. Recently, some researchers have proposed an adaptive Delay Multiply and Sum (DMAS) beamforming algorithm using linear scan transmitting with better imaging quality. Meanwhile, plane wave transmitting has garnered increased attention due to its improvement in the frame rate. Improving the performance of beamformers with plane wave transmitting has been widely studied. In order to achieve a higher imaging quality in plane wave ultrasound imaging systems, an effective ultrasound imaging method combining DMAS and chirp-coded excitation is proposed in this paper, which has a better performance under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) circumstances. We adopt the DMAS method to the plane wave transmitting mode so as to improve the contrast of the plane wave DAS method. A chirp-coded waveform is transmitted to enhance the robustness against low SNR. Simulated and experimental data are used to reconstruct the image. To prove the validity of this method, different SNRs are tested with simulated data. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can maintain a high contrast even with low SNR echo wave signals.