The nonlinear p-th root beamforming for intracardiac echocardiography application : The comparison study

Intracardiac echocardiography (ICE) plays a crucial role in supporting cardiologists during cardiac surgeries. However, conventional ICE beamforming techniques face challenges when operating in the presence of surgical instruments, leading to artifacts that degrade image quality and hinder accurate speckle tracking. This study compares the performance of the nonlinear p-th root spectral magnitude scaling (NL-p-SMS) beamforming method with other techniques, including delay-and-sum (DAS), DAS with a coherence factor (CF), and nonlinear p-th root DAS in ICE applications. Image quality performance, contras, and, grating lobe artifact suppression, were assessed in phantom and ex-vivo environments. The results demonstrated that the performance of NL-p-SMS excelled in suppressing grating lobe artifacts and contrast. Additionally, the results of vector speckle tracking showed differences according to the beamforming method. This result imply the beamforming method can affect evaluating hemodynamics during surgery. Notably, in carotid artery speckle tracking experiments, NL-p-SMS showed the lowest peak velocity compared to other beamforming methods despite a reduced number of tracking frames. These findings highlight NL-p-SMS as a promising beamforming technique for improving ICE imaging quality and surgical outcomes.