2018/04/15 by Morteza Mirzaei, Amir Asif, Mirzaei, Morteza +5
Engineering · Medicine · #FOS: Electrical engineering #FOS: Physical sciences #Flow Measurement and Analysis #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Medical Physics (physics.med-ph) #Ultrasonics and Acoustic Wave Propagation #Ultrasound Imaging and Elastography #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1804.05305
openalex publication_date 2018/04/15 · openalex created_date 2018/04/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This paper introduces a novel technique to estimate tissue displacement in quasi-static elastography. A major challenge in elastography is estimation of displacement (also referred to time-delay estimation) between pre-compressed and post-compressed ultrasound data. Maximizing normalized cross correlation (NCC) of ultrasound radio-frequency (RF) data of the pre- and post-compressed images is a popular technique for strain estimation due to its simplicity and computational efficiency. Several papers have been published to increase the accuracy and quality of displacement estimation based on NCC. All of these methods use spatial windows to estimate NCC, wherein displacement magnitude is assumed to be constant within each window. In this work, we extend this assumption along the temporal domain to exploit neighboring samples in both spatial and temporal directions. This is important since traditional and ultrafast ultrasound machines are, respectively, capable of imaging at more than 30 frame per second (fps) and 1000 fps. We call our method spatial temporal normalized cross correlation (STNCC) and show that it substantially outperforms NCC using simulation, phantom and in-vivo experiments.