A 3D Motion Compensation Method for High Frame Rate Volumetric Ultrasound Imaging based on Velocity Vector Estimation: A Simulation Study

Three-dimensional (3D) diverging wave compounding (DWC) based on a matrix array is a modern approach for high frame rate volumetric ultrasound imaging. However, the image quality of 3D DWC is easy to be deteriorated due to its high sensitivity to tissue motion. Current Doppler-based motion compensation (MoCo) methods just correct one-dimensional (1D) motion because only the velocity component in the beamforming direction can be estimated. In this paper, we propose a 3D MoCo method based on 3D velocity vector estimation to eliminate motion artifacts in three dimensions. The virtual sources are activated in a “Round-trip” sequence to record the backscattered echoes of the target. A set of velocity components are estimated with a modified Doppler method and beamforming with respect to the receive sub-apertures. The velocity vector is then calculated by modeling the corresponding components into a least-square optimizer. Finally, the artifacts in the three dimensions are compensated sequentially based on the vector maps. Computer simulations on static and moving point targets were performed to validate the feasibility of the 3D MoCo method. The results demonstrated that the proposed 3D MoCo method can restore the profiles of the point targets with a higher structural similarity (SSIM) when compared with the 1D MoCo method.