A PDE-Based Regularization Algorithm Toward Reducing Speckle Tracking Noise: A Feasibility Study for Ultrasound Breast Elastography.
A PDE-Based Regularization Algorithm Toward Reducing Speckle Tracking Noise: A Feasibility Study for Ultrasound Breast Elastography.
复制标题
基于偏微分方程的正则化算法减少散斑跟踪噪声：超声乳腺弹性成像的可行性研究
DOI：
10.1177/0161734614561128
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发表时间：
2015-10
影响因子：
2.3
通讯作者：
Jiang J
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Guo L;Xu Y;Xu Z;Jiang J
Obtaining accurate ultrasonically-estimated displacements along both axial (parallel to the acoustic beam) and lateral (perpendicular to the beam) directions is an important task for various clinical elastography applications (e.g. modulus reconstruction and temperature imaging). In this study, a partial differential equation (PDE)-based regularization algorithm was proposed to enhance motion tracking accuracy. More specifically, the proposed PDE-based algorithm, utilizing two-dimensional displacement estimates from a conventional elastography system, attempted to iteratively reduce noise contained in the original displacement estimates by mathematical regularization. In this study, the physical constraint used by the above-mentioned mathematical regularization was tissue incompressibility. This proposed algorithm was tested using computer-simulated data, a tissue-mimicking phantom and in vivo breast lesion data. Computer simulation results showed that the method significantly improved the accuracy of lateral tracking (e.g. 17X at 0.5% compression). From in vivo breast lesion data investigated, we have found that, as compared to the conventional method, higher quality axial and lateral strain images (e.g. at least 78% improvements among the estimated contrast-to-noise ratios of lateral strain images) were obtained. Our initial results demonstrated that this conceptually and computationally simple method could be useful to improve the image quality for ultrasound elastography with current clinical equipment as a post-processing tool.
