A HYBRID DISPLACEMENT ESTIMATION METHOD FOR ULTRASONIC ELASTICITY IMAGING
L.Chen, R.J. Housden, G.M. Treece, A.H. Gee and R.W. Prager
November 2008
Axial displacement estimation is fundamental to all freehand, quasistatic, ultrasonic strain imaging systems. In this paper, we present a novel estimation method that combines elements of multi-level correlation and phase-zero search to achieve the noise tolerance of the former and the speed of the latter. Given typical clinical B-scans, the hybrid method can generate more than 25 strain images per second on commodity hardware. The paper includes a full description of the hybrid method, in vivo examples to illustrate the method's clinical relevance, and finite element simulations to demonstrate its superior accuracy compared with previously published alternatives.
[817 KBytes PDF, 19 pages]
If you have difficulty viewing files that end '.gz',
which are gzip compressed, then you may be able to find
tools to uncompress them at the gzip
web site.
If you have difficulty viewing files that are in PostScript, (ending
'.ps' or '.ps.gz'), then you may be able to
find tools to view them at
the gsview
web site.
We have attempted to provide automatically generated PDF copies of documents for which only PostScript versions have previously been available. These are clearly marked in the database - due to the nature of the automatic conversion process, they are likely to be badly aliased when viewed at default resolution on screen by acroread.