Rationalized Gain Compensation for Ultrasound Imaging

摘要

Most of the automatic time gain compensation used in ultrasound scanners introduces artifacts and weakens the edges due to over-gains especially in the anechoic regions.One more procedure has been added in this paper to the algorithm developed by Pye et al.by computing both the axial (along the scan line) and lateral gains to find out the anechoic regions.Then,a further process has been applied to the anechoic regions to reduce the artifacts.The extended algorithm has been tested using ultrasound phantom and in vivo images.The detection of anechoic regions is determined by two constraints with information from different size of processing windows along axial and lateral direction,respectively.One constraint detects the dark areas along the axial direction and the second one detects the lateral direction in order to remove the case of uniform area.By controlling the constraint parameters we can define different level of anechoic regions.Test results have shown that the extended algorithm has better contrast in different tissue types than the original one in images with anechoic regions.