Abstract：Synthetic aperture sequential beamforming (SASB) is a two-stage beamforming procedure, which can be applied to B-mode imaging with an implementation of low complexity compared to the traditional synthetic transmit aperture (STA) imaging. However, like the STA imaging, the SASB is susceptible to motion artifacts due to the summation of a number of RF-data created at different time instances. In this paper, a tissue motion estimation and compensation method was proposed. First, the inter\|firing motion was estimated by cross-correlating with extra firings. At last, the second stage beamformer created a set of high resolution image points by combining information from multiple first stage focused scan lines. Field II simulation results showed that the motion compensation method proposed in this paper exhibited enhanced ability to correct location of moving tissue. When the points were moving at 0.1 m/s, the average lateral resolution after motion compensation was only reduced by 2.03% comparing to the static case, and contrast reduction was 2.7 dB. Moreover, when cysts were moving at 0-2 m/s, the contrast resolution of image after motion compensation was only reduced by 8.53% comparing to the static case.
