P3H-2 Improved Beamforming for Lateral Oscillations in Elastography Using Synthetic Aperture Imaging

In this paper we present a beamforming technique based on synthetic aperture imaging that enables to improve the radio-frequency (RF) ultrasound images with lateral oscillations for lateral displacement estimation. As described in previous work, in order to increase the accuracy of the lateral displacement estimation using images with lateral oscillations, it is necessary to reduce both the wavelength of the lateral oscillations and the width of the point spread function (PSF). This is reached in this work, by doing emit and receive beamforming using synthetic aperture data. We show that the wavelength of the lateral oscillations can be reduced by a factor 2, and the width of the PSF can be reduced by a factor radic2. We have used the images obtained by this beamforming technique for lateral displacement estimation in the field of elastography. We show that with this new approach it is possible to improve the lateral displacement estimation by nearly 25% by reducing the standard deviation of the error of the lateral estimation