An efficient motion estimation and compensation method for ultrasound synthetic aperture imaging

This paper describes a method for overcoming motion artifacts in synthetic aperture imaging. The method is based on a computer simulation study on the influence of target motion on synthetic aperture techniques. A region-based motion compensation approach is used in which only the axial motion is estimated and compensated for a given region of interest under the assumption that the whole ROI moves uniformly. The estimated axial motion is calculated with a crosscorrelation method at the point where the focused signal has the maximum energy within the ROI. We also present a method for estimating axial motion using the autocorrelation method that is widely used to estimate average Doppler frequency. Both computer simulations and in vivo experiments show that the proposed crosscorrelation-based method can greatly improve the spatial resolution and SNR of ultrasound imaging by implementing SA techniques for two-way dynamic focusing without motion artifacts. In addition, the autocorrelation-based motion compensation method provides almost the same results as the crosscorrelation-based method, but with a dramatically reduced computational complexity.