Coherent Image Herding of Inhomogeneous Motion Compensation for Synthetic Transmit Aperture in Ultrasound Image

Synthetic transmit aperture (STA) has been extensively used in ultrasound system recently because of its high frame rate and high image quality. However, STA is susceptible to motion artifacts. Some studies have proposed strategies to overcome this problem, but the image quality still degrades in inhomogeneous motion environment, which means that tissue moves in different directions and speed. In this work, we propose the coherent image herding (CIH) method to form high resolution image (HRI) with better image quality by determining whether the compensated low resolution image (LRI) needs to be chosen to form better HRI and subsequently performing a cross-correlation analysis on the raw channel data between the selected LRIs. In simulation results, the proposed method can obtain better HRI in the inhomogeneous motion environment, and it improves the contrast ratio (CR) and contrast noise ratio (CNR) about 9.5 dB and 1.5 dB respectively with only 0.71% computational complexity larger than the referenced work in the cyst phantom simulation using Field II program.