Cardiac Deformation Imaging Based on Coherent Compounding of Diverging Waves with Coded Excitation

Diverging wave (DW) transmit based on phased array offers a potential solution for cardiac deformation imaging at high frame rate. Diverging wave compounding (DWC) imaging has been developed to improve the imaging signal-to-noise ratio and contrast as well as the performance of cardiac strain estimation. We previously proposed to use coded excitation by chirp and Golay codes in DWC imaging to improve the B-mode image quality without sacrificing the frame rate. This study proposes to apply coded excitation in DWC imaging for cardiac deformation imaging and investigates its performance both in silico and in vivo. The results show that DWC with coded excitation achieves better motion estimation for cardiac deformation imaging.