Multi-angle plane wave block-to-block motion compensation for blood flow velocity measurement using ultrasonic speckle tracking

Blood flow velocity profile is utilized to calculate hemodynamic indicators such as wall shear rate, etc., which are closely related to the progression of atherosclerosis. Ultrafast ultrasound speckle tracking is widely employed for the blood flow velocity profile estimation. However, motion artifacts from blood flow scatterers in multi-angle plane wave compound imaging have an adverse impact on the flow velocity estimation. A block-to-block motion compensation method for the multi-angle plane wave compound imaging is proposed to improve the accuracy of the flow velocity measurements by eliminating motion artifacts at different radial positions by performing B-MoCo for every two neighboring frames in the time series of radio frequency signals. Compared with the direct coherent compound, the B-MoCo method reduces the normalized root mean square errors of the flow velocity estimation in the simulation and in-vitro experiments by an average of 10. 37% and 37. 82%, which has demonstrated the effectiveness of the B-MoCo method. The in-vivo experiments based on rabbit skeletal arteries have further demonstrated the clinical feasibility of the proposed method. In summary, the B-MoCo method can effectively improve the measurement accuracy of blood flow velocity profile, which is beneficial for the early diagnosis of related cardiovascular diseases. © 2024 Science Press. All rights reserved.