Fusion of ultrasound harmonic imaging with clutter removal using sparse signal separation

In ultrasound, second harmonic imaging is usually preferred due to the higher clutter artifacts and speckle noise common in the first harmonic image. Typical ultrasound use either one or the other image, applying corresponding filters for each case. In this work we propose a method based on a joint sparsity model that fuses the first and second harmonic images while performing clutter mitigation and noise reduction. Our approach, Fused Morphological Component Analysis (FMCA), uses two adaptive dictionaries for characterizing the clutter components in each image, and a common dictionary for the tissue representation. Our results indicate that the obtained images contain less clutter artifacts, less speckle noise and as such enjoy of the benefits of both harmonic input images.