Characteristics of Minimum Variance Beamformer for Frequency and Plane-wave Compounding

Ryoya Kozai, Norio Tagawa, Masasumi Yoshizawa, Takasuke Irie

Abstract: Recently, coherent plane-wave compounding (CPWC) that achieves high spatiotemporal resolution has been studied actively as a spatial compounding beamformer. Further, various frequency compounding methods have been proposed for reducing speckle noise. We already proposed the method called frequency and plane-wave compounding minimum variance distortionless response (FPWC-MVDR), which achieves high spatial resolution imaging by simultaneously optimizing frequency and spatial compounding based on minimum variance scheme. In the algorithm of this method, the data-compounded-on-receive MVDR (DCR-MVDR) principle developed for CPWC is extended and applied. In this study, we analyze the features and characteristics of FPWC-MVDR and the weaknesses to be solved in the future through experiments.