Speckle decorrelation of motion in Ultrasound Fourier images

Abstract

Ultrasound Fourier imaging was firstly proposed by J-Y Lu [1] during the 90's to obtain very high frame rate and recently revisited by Gueth et al. [2] and Garcia et al. [3]. These methods were evaluated by measuring the static characteristics of the reconstructed images, but no study attempted to evaluate their dynamic behavior, i.e. the influence of this image formation on motion estimation. This study focuses on the speckle decorrelation when different kinds of motions are applied. Simulation results show that speckle decorrelation of Fourier imaging methods is close to the conventional delay and sum (DAS) method and even better in the case of high frame rate. This study shows that Fourier imaging has strong potential to improve motion estimation compared to methods applied in conventional imaging.