Strain Image with Spatial Angular Compounding

Ultrasound elastography has been well applied in medical detection as a tool to aid diagnosis. However, in conventional ultrasound elastograms, there are patterned artifacts from non-white estimation errors. In this paper, we investigate spatial angular compounding methods to reduce the errors. The method involves averaging ultrasound angular elastograms around the same region-of-interest but from different angle views. N decorrelated sub-elastograms are weighted averaged to produce the compounded elastrogram. For our experiments, we use 3 different angled elastograms calculated from alternating frames with different steering angles obtained from base-band data captured by the iMago c21. We present results from a commercial elastic phantom showing improvement in the elastogram's quality parameters such as SNR and CNR.