Motion during image acquisition can cause image degradation in all medical imaging modalities. This is particularly relevant in 2-D ultrasound imaging, since out-of-plane motion can only be compensated for movements smaller than elevational beamwidth of the transducer. Localization based super-resolution imaging creates even a more challenging motion correction task due to the requirement of a high number of acquisitions to form a single super-resolved frame. In this study, an extension of two-stage motion correction method is proposed for 3-D motion correction. Motion estimation was performed on high volumetric rate ultrasound acquisitions with a handheld probe. The capability of the proposed method was demonstrated with a 3-D microvascular flow simulation to compensate for handheld probe motion. Results showed that two-stage motion correction method reduced the average localization error from 136 to 18 micrometres.
@article{arxiv.1902.01928,
title = {3-D Motion Correction for Volumetric Super-Resolution Ultrasound (SR-US) Imaging},
author = {S. Harput and K. Christensen-Jeffries and J. Brown and J. Zhu and G. Zhang and R. J. Eckersley and C. Dunsby and M-X. Tang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.01928},
year = {2019}
}