Influence of key parameters on motion artifacts in lateral strain estimation with spatial angular compounding

Strain imaging can reveal the changes in tissue mechanical properties related to pathological alterations by estimating tissue strains in the lateral and axial directions of ultrasound imaging. The estimation performance in the lateral direction is usually worse than that in the axial direction. Spatial angular compounding (SAC) has been demonstrated to improve the quality of lateral estimation by deriving the lateral displacements using axial displacements obtained from multi-angle transmissions. However, motion and deformation of tissues during multiple transmissions may cause motion artifacts, and thus deteriorate the quality of strain estimation. These artifacts can be reduced by choosing appropriate imaging parameters. However, few studies have been conducted to evaluate the influences of key parameters in strain estimation, such as the pulse repetition frequency (PRF), the number of steering angles (NSA), and the maximum steering angles (MSA), in terms of performance optimization. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the effects of these parameters through simulations and phantom experiments. The performance of strain estimation is evaluated by measuring the root-mean-square error (RMSE) and the standard deviation (SD) in the simulations and phantom experiments, respectively. The contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) of strain images is calculated in both the simulations and phantom experiments. The results show that motion artifacts in strain estimation can be reduced by increasing the PRF to 1 kHz. When the PRF reaches 1 kHz, further increase of the PRF shows little obvious improvement in strain estimation. An increase in the NSA can cause larger motion artifacts and deteriorate the quality of strain images, and the improvement of strain estimation is limited when the NSA is increased from 3 to 7. An NSA of 3 is thus recommended to balance the influences of motion artifacts and the improvement for strain estimation. The MSA has little influence on the motion artifacts, while increased MSA can achieve improved lateral estimation performance at the cost of a smaller imaging region. In light of the lateral strain estimation performance and imaging region, an MSA of 15° is recommended. The influences of these key parameters obtained from this study may provide insights for parameter optimization in strain estimation with SAC to minimize the effects of motion artifacts.