Ultrasound Elastography Utilizing Pre-Beam-Formed Data

Herein, a novel algorithm is proposed for strain estimation in free-hand palpation quasi-static ultrasound elastography. In all previously proposed methods for strain estimation, post-beam-formed ultrasound Radio-Frequency (RF) data have been utilized. However, we propose to exploit pre-beam-formed RF data (often called channel data) for displacement estimation in ultrasound elastography in this paper. Our novel technique builds on our recently proposed GLobal Ultrasound Elastography (GLUE) method, a regularized optimization-based approach for displacement estimation. Here, we propose Channel data based GLUE (CGLUE), which uses channel data instead of the post-beam-formed RF data. Phantom experiments show that considering channel data improves the displacement estimation results substantially.