3-D High Frame Rate Imaging With Motion Compensation (3-D HFR With MoCo): An Experimental Evaluation

Abstract

Improving the image quality of 3D high-frame-rate (HFR) echocardiography has become an important research focus. Diverging Waves techniques have already shown promising results in 3D ultrasound imaging. However, phase delays induced by large tissue displacements between ultrasound transmission can deteriorate the compounding process. Motion compensation (MoCo) approaches have been introduced and integrated into the compounding process in 2-D and in 3-D simulated ultrasound volume. Here, we propose to investigate the influence of the MoCo approach on different scenarios, including several 3-D diverging wave strategies and configurations of virtual sources. First, we proposed to formalize the placement of virtual sources according to different scenarios. Then the proposed method has been tested on numerical simulations using Field II, and in vitro experimentations with a homemade rotating phantom. The nine approaches were compared quantitatively by estimating the contrast to noise (CNR) and contrast ratio (CR). The results confirmed that MoCo increased the CNR and CR for each case. On average, the MoCo algorithm increased the CNR/CR by ${\mathcal {C}}$ 3.2/8.4 dB in silico, and of ${\mathcal {C}}$ 1.4/1.8 dB in vitro, respectively.