Effects and limitations of motion compensation in synthetic aperture techniques

Synthetic aperture (SA) schemes provide effective means to improve SNR and resolution of ultrasound images. Since SA schemes are subjective to motion artifacts due to their long data acquisition time, however, there have been efforts to compensate for the motion artifacts. In this paper, we investigate the effects of a commonly used motion compensation method when it is applied to a SA scheme, called bidirectional pixel-based focusing (BiPBF). From the results, we verified that axial motion is a dominant factor in causing the motion artifacts and the axial motion can be compensated successfully at the sacrifice of sidelobe levels.