A Spline Based Method for Lateral Displacement and Ultrasound Strain Estimation

Ultrasound elastography is a technique of imaging information about tissue elastic moduli, which plays an important role in early diagnosis of several kinds of tumor. Usually, elastograms display only axial displacement and corresponding tissue strain. In lateral direction, however, there is no phase information and the precision of data is lacking too. In this paper, a spline based method for lateral displacement and the corresponding strain estimation is proposed. SSE, which is computed based on lateral data lines in pre-and post-ultrasound signal, was used as a pattern-matching function to estimate lateral displacement. With this method, we can obtain directly continuous estimates with lower computational cost. The SNRe and CNRe of elastograms have been evaluated using simulated data.