Sensitivity of minimum variance beamforming to tissue aberrations

Abstract

Minimum variance beamformers adapt to the received data. In the case of perfect data, this beamformer can produce images with better point and edge definitions than conventional delay-and-sum beamformers. But in medical ultrasound imaging, the quality of the data is often corrupted by aberration. As higher resolution often is associated with less robustness, a study using a 1D phase aberrator was done to find how the minimum variance beamformer performs with realistic phase aberrations. We found that with proper subaperture smoothing and regularization, the minimum variance beamformer will give better or similar performance compared to the delay-and-sum beamformer for aberrations typically found in the human body.