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Application of low-complexity generalized coherence factor to in vivo data

  • Original Article–Physics & Engineering
  • Published:
Journal of Medical Ultrasonics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

Beamforming using the generalized coherence factor (GCF) reduces sidelobe artifacts and provides an excellent contrast-to-noise ratio. We previously proposed GCFreal, a method to calculate GCF without generating analytic signals, and GCFbin, a method to calculate GCF by binarizing the received signals. In this study, we applied these methods to in vivo data and showed the effect of the computational complexity reduction on contrast performance.

Methods

Channel RF data were acquired from the human liver and gallbladder. We set up several observation points in each data set and investigated the mechanism that causes the differences in contrast performance among the methods based on the signals and their power spectra in the channel direction.

Results

For GCF and GCFreal, the obtained values were almost the same. However, there were large differences in GCFbin from GCF when the signals from the focus point or from outside the focus point were received on different channels. This is because the amplitudes of the signals with high coherence and those with low coherence were changed by binarizing the signals.

Conclusion

While GCFbin can significantly reduce the computational complexity, there are differences in the values of GCFbin and GCF due to binarizing of the received signals. However, this difference resulted in GCFbin being superior to GCF in terms of artifact reduction. This is owing to the elimination of amplitude information in GCFbin, which makes it a new efficient coherence factor with different characteristics from GCF.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. FUJIFILM Healthcare Corporation, 3-1-1 Higashikoigakubo, Kokubunji, Tokyo, 185-0014, Japan

    Masanori Hisatsu

  2. Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering, Tohoku University, Sendai, Miyagi, 980-8579, Japan

    Masanori Hisatsu, Mototaka Arakawa & Hiroshi Kanai

  3. Graduate School of Engineering, Tohoku University, Sendai, Miyagi, 980-8579, Japan

    Shohei Mori, Mototaka Arakawa & Hiroshi Kanai

Authors
  1. Masanori Hisatsu
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  2. Shohei Mori
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  3. Mototaka Arakawa
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  4. Hiroshi Kanai
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Masanori Hisatsu.

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The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Ethical approval

This study was approved by the institutional ethical committee and was performed with the informed consent of the subject.

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Hisatsu, M., Mori, S., Arakawa, M. et al. Application of low-complexity generalized coherence factor to in vivo data. J Med Ultrasonics 49, 555–567 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10396-022-01243-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10396-022-01243-1

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