Cardiac Motion estimation based on transverse oscillation and ultrafast diverging wave imaging

Ultrafast ultrasound imaging using plane waves (PW) has demonstrated its potential in assessing complicated motion patterns in the blood or in the tissue. On the other hand, the introduction of transverse oscillations (TO) combined with Phase Based vector Motion estimation algorithms (PBM) has shown to be a very promising technique to improve transverse motion estimation. Cardiac imaging could greatly benefit of a combination of ultrafast TO and PBM. Unfortunately, due to the presence of the ribs, cardiac imaging has to be done with a phased array. Consequently ultrafast imaging of the heart is usually performed with diverging waves (DW) instead of PW. In this paper, the objective is to extend our previously developed ultrafast PW TO technique to ultrafast imaging of the heart using DW. A validation of the method is proposed using CREANUIS simulations with a realistic cardiac sequence.