Generalized Null Subtraction Factor: A Post-Filtering Framework for Contrast Enhancement in Ultrafast Ultrasound Imaging

Abstract

Poor spatial resolution and contrast remain major challenges in ultrafast ultrasound imaging. Null subtraction imaging (NSI) improves lateral resolution but often degrades speckle quality and contrast. Its extension, dynamic DC-biased NSI (dDC-NSI), mitigates this trade-off by introducing a dynamic DC bias; however, slight speckle suppression may still occur in homogeneous regions, leading to dark-region artifacts. In this work, a generalized null subtraction factor (gNSF) is proposed as a post-processing framework. gNSF applies multiple apodizations, followed by a mirror-flipping and symmetric summation operation, and defines a weighting factor based on the energy ratio between a bias term and a zero-mean sequence. By incorporating the dynamic DC bias, coherent echoes are enhanced while incoherent noise is suppressed. Phantom experiments show that gNSF achieves a contrast performance (gCNR close to 1) comparable to GCF and dDC-NSI, and superior to DAS and NSI. In addition, gNSF improves CR and sSNR by 20% and 21% compared with dDC-NSI, indicating reduced speckle over-suppression and a better balance between contrast and speckle preservation.