Ultrasound Elastography for Biomedical Applications and Medicine

4 Ultrasonic Methods for Assessment of Tissue Motion in Elastography

Jingfeng Jiang and Bo Peng

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA

4.1 Introduction

Tracking tissue motion using ultrasound data has been an active field since the 1980s. In the early work [1, 2], researchers attempted to monitor tissue displacements resulting from physiological stimuli, in order to infer tissue mechanical properties or compensate for undesirable physiological motion among multiple images by tracking those unwanted physiological motions [3]. In 1991, Prof. Ophir's group first proposed strain elastography [4], demonstrating its ability to quantify very small internal strains in tissue phantoms and soft tissue samples. Progress in tissue motion assessment made within the framework of ultrasound elastography (including strain elastography, shear wave elastography, and acoustic radiation force imaging) built on those early attempts and were facilitated by improvements in hardware over that used by the earlier investigations.

A number of motion‐tracking techniques have been proposed and may be classified into the following categories, according to the signal‐processing method used, as follows:

• Frequency‐domain techniques: A phase‐based method is applied to find zero‐phase contour between the pre‐ and post‐deformation ultrasound signals.
• Maximum likelihood (ML) time‐domain correlation‐based techniques: A time‐domain (magnitude) correlation ...