Improvement of Delay and Sum beamforming photoacoustic imaging based on delay-multiply-sum-to-standard-deviation-factor

Delay and Sum (DAS) is one of the most prevalent and common beamforming algorithms used in ultrasound and photoacoustic image (PAI) reconstruction. This beamforming algorithm is mostly used due to its simple implementation and real time capability. However, it has several drawbacks such as high level side lobes, low image resolution and poor contrast. To address these issues, a new adaptive weighting factor has been proposed in this paper, named delay-multiply-sum-to-standard-deviation-factor (DMSSF). It improves all kinds of drawback like, lateral resolution, signal to noise ratio (SNR), and reduces side lobes of the reconstructed image compare to the other conventional methods like DAS, DAS+CF. The proposed weighting technique leads to get narrower main lobe and make the target much more detectable with respect to background. This novel method contributes significantly to the improvement of linear array based clinical photoacoustic imaging and expands the horizon of DAS image reconstruction and its potentiality.