Tangential oscillations for motion estimation in echocardiography

In this paper we present a feasibility study of transverse oscillations in the field of echocardiography. Transverse oscillations beamforming methods have been shown to be able to improve the accuracy of local motion estimation with ultrasound images. This has only been studied for linear geometry while this paper shows the feasibility for sectorial geometry used in echocardiography. The possibility to obtain point spread functions showing transverse oscillations is demonstrated and the application for motion estimation is also studied. The improvement is mostly in terms of robustness of the lateral motion estimated. Indeed the standard deviation of the estimated lateral motion is decreased by more than a factor of 2 when the axial motion is less than 0.04 mm.