Exploiting Mechanics-Based Priors for Lateral Displacement Estimation in Ultrasound Elastography
Tracking the displacement between the pre- and post-deformed radio-frequency (RF) frames is a pivotal step of ultrasound elastography, which depicts tissue mechanical properties to identify pathologies. Due to ultrasound's poor ability to capture information pertaining to the lateral direction, the existing displacement estimation techniques fail to generate an accurate lateral displacement or strain map. The attempts made in the literature to mitigate this well-known issue suffer from one of the following limitations: 1) Sampling size is substantially increased, rendering the method computationally and memory expensive. 2) The lateral displacement estimation entirely depends on the axial one, ignoring data fidelity and creating large errors. This paper proposes exploiting the effective Poisson's ratio (EPR)-based mechanical correspondence between the axial and lateral strains along with the RF data fidelity and displacement continuity to improve the lateral displacement and strain estimation accuracies. We call our techniques MechSOUL (Mechanically-constrained Second-Order Ultrasound eLastography) and L1-MechSOUL (L1-norm-based MechSOUL), which optimize L2- and L1-norm-based penalty functions, respectively. Extensive validation experiments with simulated, phantom, and in vivo datasets demonstrate that MechSOUL and L1-MechSOUL's lateral strain and EPR estimation abilities are substantially superior to those of the recently-published elastography techniques. We have published the MATLAB codes of MechSOUL and L1-MechSOUL at http://code.sonography.ai.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Methods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Virtual Source Synthetic Aperture for Accurate Lateral Displacement Estimation in Ultrasound Elastography
Ultrasound elastography is an emerging noninvasive imaging technique wherein pathological alterations can be visualized by revealing the mechanical properties of the tissue. Estimating tissue displacement in all directio…
Physically Inspired Constraint for Unsupervised Regularized Ultrasound Elastography
Displacement estimation is a critical step of virtually all Ultrasound Elastography (USE) techniques. Two main features make this task unique compared to the general optical flow problem: the high-frequency nature of ult…
Optical Flow EstimationLateral Strain Imaging using Self-supervised and Physically Inspired Constraints in Unsupervised Regularized Elastography
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have shown promising results for displacement estimation in UltraSound Elastography (USE). Many modifications have been proposed to improve the displacement estimation of CNNs for USE …
A Constrained Optimization approach for Ultrasound Shear Wave Speed Estimation with Time-Lateral Plane Cleaning
Ultrasound shear wave elastography (SWE) is a noninvasive way to measure stiffness of soft tissue for medical diagnosis. In SWE imaging, an acoustic radiation force induces tissue displacement, which creates shear waves …
DenoisingMedical DiagnosisSimultaneous reconstruction and displacement estimation for spectral-domain optical coherence elastography
Optical coherence elastography allows the characterization of the mechanical properties of tissues, and can be performed through estimating local displacement maps from subsequent acquisitions of a sample under different…
Denoising