Investigation on 3D high frame rate imaging with motion compensation (MoCo)

Cardiac high-frame-rate (HFR) imaging has shown promise in bringing new diagnostic information. The development of advanced 3D-HFR echocardiographic techniques, with the aim of providing high image quality, has become a key research focus. Methods such as Steered Diverging Waves and Sub-Aperture Diverging Waves have been already extended to 3D. Because phase delays due to large tissue displacements can blur the compound images, 3D Motion compensation (MoCo) approaches have recently been introduced and integrated in the compounding process. In this in silico work, we were interested in investigating the influence of the MoCo approach on three different diverging waves strategies, each with three different configurations of virtual sources. First, the locations of the virtual sources were formalized according to the chosen diverging wave strategy and the diverging wave opening angle. Then, the nine approaches were compared quantitatively by estimating the CNR and CR. The results confirmed that MoCo increased the CNR andCR for each case.