A United Bandpass-Angular Weighting template for Stolt's f-k in Coherent Plane-Wave Compounding

The Fourier f-k Migration for plane wave greatly reduce the computational load for coherence plane wave compounding (CPWC). Based on the f-k migration, Chen proposed the angular weighting framework in Fourier domain and the angular weighting template. However, to keep the template simple, Chen's template is angle-dependent only, which ignores the frequency information. To take full advantage of the RF data for better image quality, this paper proposes a new united bandpass- angular weighting template for Stolt's f-k in CPWC. The proposed beamformer is compared to the original Stolt's f-k method and Chen's method based on the datasets (simulation, phantom and invivo) provided by the IEEE IUS 2016 Plane-wave Beamforming Challenge. Compared to the conventional methods, the new united template offers improvements over contrast without extra computational load. Considering the relationship between the united template and FIR filter, we also applied it straightly to the harmonic imaging.