A K-space-based Approach to Coherence Estimation

Improving contrast in ultrasound images has been widely studied. Many of the contrast improvement methods such as apodization, minimum variance beamforming, and coherence-based methods rely on processing of the raw channel data. In contrast, we propose a coherence estimation technique called Coherence of Estimated Channel Data (CECD) using beamformed data. This method is based in k-space, where the RF channel data is estimated from the beamformed RF data to measure the coherence. Simulation and in-vivo results showed that CECD can provide near or better image quality in terms of the clutter level, contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) and speckle signal-to-noise (SNR).