Hadamard-Based Recursive Aperture Decoded Ultrasound Imaging (READI) With Estimated Motion-Compensated Compounding...

Hadamard matrix-based aperture encoding is a method for producing synthetic aperture datasets with high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Recently, the pulse inversion capabilities of bias-sensitive top-orthogonal-to-bottom-electrode (TOBE) arrays have driven the development of multiple Hadamard-based sequences. These sequences produce high-quality static images but are sensitive to motion. This work introduces recursive aperture decoded ultrasound imaging (READI) and estimated motion-compensated compounding (EMC2), which look to reduce this sensitivity. READI is a novel decoding and beamforming technique for Hadamard aperture-encoded sequences that produces multiple low-resolution images from subsets of the full sequence. These READI images are less affected by motion and sum to form the complete high-resolution image. EMC2 describes the process of comparing these low-resolution images to estimate the underlying motion, then warping them to align before compounding. This produces a high-resolution image that is resilient to motion. READI with EMC2 applied to the TOBE-based fast orthogonal row-column electronic scanning (FORCES) sequence. It is shown to fully restore images corrupted by probe motion and to recover tissue speckle and boundaries in images of a beating heart phantom. READI low-resolution images by themselves are demonstrated to be a marked improvement over a sparse Hadamard scheme with the same transmit count, and are able to recover blood speckle at a flow rate of 42 cm/s.