Plane-wave based vector flow imaging: Beamforming and velocity estimation loads in different processing scenarios

Recent advancements in ultrasound vector Doppler (VD) techniques have boosted the investigation of 2D regions of interest (ROIs). Several methods have been proposed, but their implementation on commercial systems is still limited. First, the investigation of wide ROIs at high frame rate requires the transmission of plane waves (PWs) and parallel beamforming in reception. Furthermore, the extraction of vector velocities at multiple points is typically performed by computationally demanding multi-beam (MB) or speckle tracking (ST) techniques. In this work, we compare the performance of these two approaches in terms of accuracy and computational load when the vector velocities are computed along increasing numbers of velocity estimation lines.