Diverging wave compounding: direct comparison of two popular approaches

Diverging wave imaging is the most prominent transmit sequence in fast cardiac imaging. Indeed, as this type of ultrasound transmit insonifies a significant part of the region of interest at once, less transmit events are required to reconstruct an entire image leading to an improved time resolution. However, the flipside of this approach is that image quality reduces in terms of spatial resolution, signal-and contrast-to-noise ratio. To mitigate these negative side effects, coherent spatial compounding is typically used. However, different investigators have proposed different compounding schemes and to date, these approaches have not directly been contrasted. The goal of the current work was, therefore, to compare two popular compounding approaches both by computer simulations and experimentally.