The dark region artifact in adaptive ultrasound beamforming

An undesired effect, the dark region artifact (DRA), has been under-communicated in our research community. The DRA appear next to acoustically strong targets for some of the many adaptive beamformers introduced in the literature. This study investigates the DRA for a collection of adaptive beamformers and shows that this effect originates because some of the methods fail to estimate which signals arise in the mainlobe and which originates from sidelobes. The DRA results in darker regions in the ultrasound images, indicating the wrong acoustical amplitude. Therefore, the measured contrast can falsely appear higher for adaptive beamformers affected by the DRA.