An alternative method to classical beamforming for transverse oscillation images: Application to elastography

Transverse oscillation techniques have shown their high potential for accurate and robust vector motion estimation for both flow and tissue. Unfortunately to form such images, it is necessary to modify the ultrasound scanner's beamformer. This paper proposes alternative strategies to create transverse oscillation images in order to estimate motions in ultrasound images. The proposed methods are based on 1) one dimensional convolution or filtering of the radio frequency images or 2) two dimensional convolution or filtering of the B-mode images. They are first evaluated on a single lateral motion case in simulations and experiments, and then in a quasi-static elastography situation. The results with our filtering/convolution approach are very similar to the ones obtained with TO images obtained by classical beamforming. The mean deviation between the classical TO beamforming and the proposed method is 5.5%, which validates that one direction filtering is an efficient way to simplify the creation of TO images.