Enhanced Strain Imaging Using Quality Measure

Displacement estimation is a crucial step in ultrasonic strain imaging. The displacement between a pre- and postcompression signal in the current data window is estimated by first shifting the postcompression signal by the displacement obtained in the previous data window to reduce their decorrelation and then determining the remaining part of the displacement through autocorrelation and conversion of phase difference into time delay. However, since strain image quality tends to vary with the amount of compression applied, we propose two new methods for enhancing strain image quality, i.e., displacement normalization and adaptive persistence. Both in vitro and in vivo experiments are carried out to acquire ultrasound data and produce strain images in real time under the application of quasi static compression. The experimental results demonstrate that the methods are quite effective in improving strain image quality and thus can be applied to implementing an ultrasound elasticity imaging system that operates in real time.