Edge-preserving ultrasonic strain imaging with uniform precision

Ultrasound elastography involves measuring the mechanical properties of tissue, and has many applications in diagnostics and intervention. A common step in different elastography methods is imaging the tissue while it undergoes deformation and estimating the displacement field from the images. A popular next step is to estimate tissue strain, which gives clues into the underlying tissue elasticity modulus. To estimate the strain, one should compute the gradient of the displacement image, which amplifies the noise. The noise is commonly minimized by least square estimation of the gradient from multiple displacement measurements, which reduces the noise by sacrificing image resolution. In this work, we adaptively adjust the level and orientation of the smoothing using two different mechanisms. First, the precision of the displacement field decreases significantly in the regions with high signal decorrelation, which requires increasing the smoothness. Second, smoothing the strain field at the boundaries between different tissue types blurs the edges, which can render small targets invisible. To minimize blurring and noise, we perform anisotropic smoothing parallel to the direction of edges. The first mechanism ensures that textures/variations in the strain image reflect underlying tissue properties and are not caused by errors in the displacement estimation. The second mechanism keeps the edges between different tissue structures sharp while minimizing the noise. We validate the proposed method using phantom and in-vivo clinical data.