A model based beamformer utilizing spatial chirps to suppress off-axis and near-field clutter

In vivo ultrasonic imaging with transducer arrays suffers from degraded visualization caused by a number of sources including fundamental beamforming limitations and media dependent limitations such as sound speed variation, off-axis scattering and reverberation. To decrease the effect of off-axis scattering and reverberation, we present a new algorithm to suppress these sources of degradation while preserving the radio frequency signal. The algorithm is applied to an 8 patient cohort that includes 43 data sets. The contrast improved by 7.3±4.6 dB, while the contrast to noise ratio remained nearly unchanged, -0.4±5.9 dB.