Adaptive ultrasonic displacement estimation for elastic shock waves in soft solids

The displacements induced by propagating elastic shock waves have regions of complex motion that can change rapidly across a single wave profile. Conventional tracking algorithms are not well adapted to the task of tracking the shock front. An adaptive algorithm based on polynomial splines and the normalized cross correlation is presented. It is shown to that it can track the shock front in simulated data and in data measured in a heterogeneous tissue-mimicking gelatin phantom.