Duplex synthetic aperture imaging with tissue motion compensation

This paper investigates a method for tissue motion estimation and compensation in synthetic transmits aperture imaging. The approach finds the tissue velocity and the direction of the motion at very tissue region by cross-correlating high resolution lines beamformed along multiple directions at each image points. Compensation is applied in the beamformer by tracking the image points using the velocity and angle estimates from the closest estimation point. Simulation results using Field II show nearly perfect motion compensation with no appreciable difference in contrast resolution after compensation. Phantom measurements show similar performance with differences in contrast resolution of 29% and 0.61% before and after compensation, respectively.