Nonlinear beamforming for intracardiac echocardiography: a comparative study

Hyunhee Kim; Seonghee Cho; Eunwoo Park; Sinyoung Park; Donghyeon Oh; Ki Jong Lee; Chulhong Kim

doi:10.1007/s13534-024-00352-9

Nonlinear beamforming for intracardiac echocardiography: a comparative study

Biomed Eng Lett. 2024 Jan 31;14(3):571-582. doi: 10.1007/s13534-024-00352-9. eCollection 2024 May.

Authors

Hyunhee Kim^#¹, Seonghee Cho^#², Eunwoo Park¹, Sinyoung Park², Donghyeon Oh¹, Ki Jong Lee³, Chulhong Kim^{1

2

3

4

5}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electrical Engineering, Convergence IT Engineering, Device Innovation Center, and Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang, 37673 South Korea.
² Department of Electrical Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang, 37673 South Korea.
³ Medical Device Innovation Center, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang, 37673 South Korea.
⁴ Mechanical Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang, 37673 South Korea.
⁵ Medical Science and Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang, 37673 South Korea.

^# Contributed equally.

PMID: 38645597
PMCID: PMC11026316 (available on 2025-01-31)
DOI: 10.1007/s13534-024-00352-9

Abstract

Intracardiac echocardiography (ICE) enables cardiac imaging with a wide field of view, deep imaging depth, and high frame rate during surgery. However, strong sidelobe and grating lobe artifacts created by the ultra-compact transducer degrade its image quality, making diagnosis and monitoring of treatment difficult. Conventionally, aperture apodization algorithms are often used to suppress sidelobe and grating lobe artifacts at the expense of lateral resolution, which is undesirable in ICE. In this study, we present comparative results of the beamforming methods specifically in ICE application. We demonstrate and compare five nonlinear beamforming algorithms in ICE: nonlinear p^th root delay and sum (NL-p-DAS), nonlinear p^th root spectral magnitude scaling (NL-p-SMS), delay-and-sum with coherence factors (DAS + SCF), delay and sum with apodization (DAS + apodization) and delay and sum (DAS). Phantom and ex-vivo experiment compare the performance of each algorithm in static and dynamic conditions. DAS + SCF shows the best lateral resolution, and all four algorithms improve the image contrast and sidelobe suppression over conventional DAS. NL-p-SMS stands out for the best axial resolution and suppression of grating lobe artifacts. For motion tracking, NL-p-SMS shows better temporal resolution than other methods. Overall, all the beamforming algorithms other than DAS showed improved image quality. Among them, NL-p-SMS, which has a high temporal resolution, showed the potential for providing more accurate information regards movement tracking.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13534-024-00352-9.

Keywords: Intracardiac echocardiography; Nonlinear ultrasound beamforming; Reflection artifact; Speckle tracking; Ultrasound imaging.

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