Angular coherence in ultrasound imaging: Theory and applications

The popularity of plane-wave transmits at multiple transmit angles for synthetic transmit aperture (or coherent compounding) has spawned a number of adaptations and new developments of ultrasonic imaging. However, the coherence properties of backscattered signals with plane-wave transmits at different angles are unknown and may impact a subset of these techniques. To provide a framework for the analysis of the coherence properties of such signals, this article introduces the angular coherence theory in medical ultrasound imaging. The theory indicates that the correlation function of such signals forms a Fourier transform pair with autocorrelation function of the receive aperture function. This conclusion can be considered as an extended form of the van Cittert Zernike theorem. The theory is validated with simulation and experimental results obtained on speckle targets. On the basis of the angular coherence of the backscattered wave, a new short-lag angular coherence beamformer is proposed and compared with an existing spatial-coherence-based beamformer. An application of the theory in phase shift estimation and speed of sound estimation is also presented. (C) 2017 Acoustical Society of America.