Original Articles
Congyao Zhang, Dequan Guo, Hao
Abstract
Ultrasound elastography has been shown to be useful technique in imaging information about the tissue’s elastic moduli, which plays an important role in early diagnosis of several kinds of tumors. Usually, elastograms display only axial displacement and axial strain. Lateral displacement and strain estimation is difficult because there is no phase information and the precision of data is lacking too. Most of the lateral estimation methods previously reported are based on cross-correlation function (CCF). And several kinds of interpolations of high computational cost are often used to obtain more accurate results. In this paper, a two-step method combining two-dimensional sum of squared differences (SSD) and cubic spline representation for lateral displacement and strain estimation is introduced. This method can result directly in accurate and continuous estimates with no need for interpolation. Computer simulations and phantom experiments are performed to investigate the performance of proposed method in terms of bias and jitter errors and image quality