Abstract
In elasticity imaging, the ultrasound frames acquired during tissue deformation are analyzed to estimate the internal displacements and strains. If the deformation rate is high, high-frame-rate imaging techniques are required to avoid the severe decorrelation between the neighboring ultrasound images. In these high-frame-rate techniques, however, the broader and less focused ultrasound beam is transmitted and, hence, the image quality is degraded. We quantitatively compared strain images obtained using conventional and ultrafast ultrasound imaging methods. The performance of the elasticity imaging was evaluated using custom-designed, numerical simulations. Our results demonstrate that signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) and spatial resolutions in displacement and strain images acquired using conventional and ultrafast ultrasound imaging are comparable. This study suggests that the high-frame-rate ultrasound imaging can be reliably used in elasticity imaging if frame rate is critical.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 987-995 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control |
| Volume | 54 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - May 2007 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Manuscript received May 23, 2006; accepted December 11, 2006. Support in part by National Institutes of Health under grants CA 110079, CA 112784, and EB 004963, and Army Medical Research and Material Command under grant DAMD17-02-1-0097 is gratefully acknowledged. Authors would like to thank Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) for providing an access to a high speed computational cluster.