Improving ultrasonic medical image quality by attenuation of the secondary lobes

In ultrasound imaging, the delay-and-sum beamforming constitutes a solid measure of the acoustic reflectivity of the scene. If it is applied to synthetic images following the Total Focus Method, it can generate an image with high resolution and contrast. The present work analyzes the data set that composes an image point from a statistical point of view and proposes a new beam formation technique capable of improving the contrast and resolution of the image.