Effect of Lateral Motion of Ultrasonic Probe on Measurement Accuracy of Internal Tissue Displacement

Lateral motion of the ultrasound probe could result in estimation errors in vertical displacement of tissues of interest obtained from M-mode ultrasound measurements. In this paper, the effect of lateral probe motion on the measurement accuracy of internal displacement is examined by means of numerical and phantom simulations. The displacement was obtained by tracking the speckle echoes with a phase sensitive method. The simulation results show that the phase estimation errors increases with the lateral probe motion greater than 10 mu m per consecutive M-mode frames with the presented conditions employed. The error is also greater with the poorer signal-to-noise ratio of the speckle echoes. The moving average filter has been shown to be effective to reduce phase estimation errors due to random noise in acquired ultrasonic signals.