A Novel Transmission Sequence and Motion Compensation for Improving Coherent Plane Wave Compounding of Rapidly Moving Targets

Coherent plane wave compounding (CPWC) is a modern method for high-frame-rate ultrasound imaging, but is highly sensitive to sidelobes and motion artifacts, resulting in reduced imaging quality. Existing methods for motion compensation (MoCo) usually only consider the spatial positions of moving targets or the temporal continuity of slow-time signals, which is not conducive to the spatiotemporal resolution of the sequence of compounding images. Moreover, the traditional transmission sequence methods cause the intersection or rotation of sidelobes to produce large interference. Therefore, we propose a novel framework combined with a centerosymmetric polar transmission sequence (CPTS) and spatiotemporal MoCo technology to minimize sidelobes interference and motion artifacts while taking into account the spatial positions and temporal continuity the sequence of compounding images. Simulations for static and moving point scatterers were performed to validate the feasibility of our proposed methods. Compared with the results obtained with traditional transmission sequences and existing MoCo methods, the proposed method can realize the point scatterer imaging with narrower width of main lobe and lower height of sidelobe. In conclusion, this framework is great potential in high-quality ultrasound imaging of rapidly moving targets.