Short-lag spatial coherence combined with synthetic aperture imaging

Recently, short-lag spatial coherence (SLSC) imaging has drawn much attention from researchers due to benefits such as improved speckle signal-to-noise ratio and contrast-to-noise ratio compared to conventional B-mode imaging based on delay-and-sum beamforming. However, SLSC imaging has good performance just around the transmit focal point, which is quite a drawback. In this paper, we propose a new method that combines SLSC imaging and synthetic aperture imaging to address such a shortcoming. The efficacy of the proposed method is verified through simulations and experiments using Field II echo data and phantom data acquired with an actual ultrasound system.