A New Plane Wave Compounding Scheme Using Phase Compensation for Motion Detection

Plane wave (PW) transmission has enabled multiple new applications, such as shear wave elastography, ultrafast Doppler imaging, and functional ultrasound imaging. PW compounding (PWC), which coherently sums the echo signals from multiple PW transmits with different angles, is widely used to improve B-mode image quality. When the motion between two speckle images is estimated, PWC suffers from an inherent displacement estimation error. This is derived theoretically and experimentally demonstrated in this work. We show that the phase difference between the acquired data with PW emissions with different angles is related to this error. When the absolute value of the phase difference is larger than pi/2, the displacement estimation error occurs. A new scheme, named initial-phase-compensated PWC (IPCPWC), is proposed, which compensates the phase of echo signals from each PW transmit and maintains the absolute value of the phase difference smaller than pi/2. The increased signal-to-noise ratio and reduced jitter of IPCPWC in motion data are demonstrated using tissue mimicking phantoms compared with PWC.

Automated summary

Plane wave transmission has various applications in ultrasound imaging. Conventional PW compounding techniques suffer from displacement estimation errors. This study proposes a new scheme to improve the quality of PW compounding.