Lateral ultrasound strain imaging using subband processing

Abstract

Abstract. Since most biological tissues are nearly incompressible, the axial compression leads to expansion in the lateral and elevational directions. Although axial strain is the main component of three dimensional strain field, estimation of the lateral strain may provide important additional information on the tissue mechanical properties. In this paper, we employed the idea and principle of image compounding and proposed a subband processing method to estimate lateral strain. To keep lateral radio freqency (RF) signal bandwidth and strain resolution, we split axial RF signal into several subband signals and then estimate lateral strains of these subband signals along lateral direction, finally average these strains to get a lateral compounded strain image. The simulation results demonstrate that the elastographic signal-to-noise ratio of the lateral compounded strain image is improved by 48% using this subband processing method, compared with the conventional method.