A new adaptive imaging technique using generalized coherence factor

Beamforming artifacts due to sound velocity inhomogeneities degrade both spatial and contrast resolution. In this paper, a new adaptive imaging technique is proposed to minimize such beam formation artifacts using the generalized coherence factor (GCF) weighting. The simulation and experimental results show that the proposed technique can significantly improve the degraded image quality due to phase aberration for both point targets and diffuse scatterers. The GCF technique is also compared with the correlation-based technique and the parallel receive beam technique (a.k.a. PARCA). Both performance and computational complexity are also discussed.