Improved strain estimation using a novel 1.5D approach: Preliminary results

Changes in biological tissues change their elasticity. Elasticity imaging enjoys an ever increasing role in disease diagnosis. In elastography, tissue strain is estimated using signal processing. Strain is conventionally calculated from estimated displacements between the pre- and post-compression ultrasonic echo signals. In this paper, we introduce a novel 1.5D strain estimator. The proposed algorithm uses 1D windows for fast computation, but searches in the lateral direction to account for non-axial motion. The performance of our method outperforms traditional methods, especially in the presence of higher applied strain. The image quality also improves significantly.