Adaptive Acoustic Imaging with Differentiable Beamforming

A method of ultrasound imaging comprising:

• a) performing a pulse-echo acquisition to produce channel signals using ultrasound transducers, wherein the acquisition comprises transmitting ultrasound signals using transmit elements and receiving pulse-echo responses of the transmitted ultrasound signals using receive elements;
• b) processing the transmitted and received channel signals to produce a dataset of a set of transmit elements and a set of receive elements;
• c) calculating an estimate of a critical imaging parameter;
• d) performing beamforming using the dataset and the estimate of the critical imaging parameter;
• e) calculating a desired loss function, wherein the loss function is minimized with respect to the critical imaging parameter;
• f) differentiating the calculated loss function with respect to the critical imaging parameter by backpropagation;
• g) updating the estimate of the critical imaging parameter;
• h) repeating steps (d)-(g) until a convergence condition is satisfied;
• i) generating an enhanced ultrasound image using the estimate of the critical imaging parameter.