An Adaptive Harmonic Separation Technique for Ultrasound Harmonic Imaging

Abstract

Objective: An adaptive harmonic separation (HS) technique is proposed to overcome the limitations in conventional filtering techniques for ultrasound (US) tissue harmonic imaging (THI).

Methods: Based on expectation-maximization source separation, the proposed HS technique adaptively models the depth-varying fundamental and harmonic components in the frequency domain and separates the two by applying their calculated posterior probabilities. Phantom experiments with a Tx center frequency of 2 MHz are conducted to evaluate the proposed HS-based US THI schemes.

Results: The phantom images show that the proposed single-pulse THI scheme utilizing the HS technique provides not only an average improvement of 19.2% in axial resolution compared to the conventional bandpass filtering scheme but also similar image quality to that of the conventional pulse-inversion (PI) scheme which requires two Tx/Rx sequences for each scan line. Furthermore, when combined with the PI technique, the HS technique provides a uniform axial resolution over the entire 170 mm imaging depth with an average improvement of 17.1% compared to the conventional PI scheme.

Conclusion: These results show that the proposed adaptive HS technique is capable of improving both the frame rate and the image quality of US THI.

Keywords: Expectation-maximization algorithm; Pulse inversion; Source separation; Ultrasound harmonic imaging.