A Comparison of Global and Local Sound Speed Estimation for Aberration Correction in Abdominal Models

With the prevalence and rise in obesity, phase aberration correction in abdominal layers is of increasing in clinical importance, as fat layers in the body degrade the beam, reducing SNR. Sound speed based techniques hold significant correction potential, but image quality improvement is determined by the quality of both the correction technique and the sound speed estimates. Previously, we introduced a method for global average sound speed estimation from full synthetic aperture data. In this work, we introduce a corresponding local sound speed inversion technique, and a phase aberration correction technique based on the global average sound speed. We demonstrate the efficacy of these techniques for phase aberration correction in abdominal wall model simulations and in real data of an aberrating tissue layer phantom.