Speckle Pattern Correlation with Lateral Aperture Translation: Experimental Results and Implications for Spatial Compounding

Trahey, Gregg E.; Smith, Stephen W.; Ramm, Olaf T. von

doi:10.1109/t-uffc.1986.26827

Cited by 235 publications

(116 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…27,28,37 The degrees of accuracy can be beam profile and depth dependent, but these properties are well known and should be easily accountable when ultrasound is used to monitor tissue motion during radiation oncology treatments. 38 We noted that fractional tracking variations were from about 7% to 15%, with the liver being the highest. Although these numbers are very small for comparison, the fact that the liver has the highest variation is not really a surprise because it is well known that there is actually tissue deformation occurring in the liver when it is being displaced by respirations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 74%

Potential Use of Ultrasound Speckle Tracking for Motion Management During Radiotherapy

Rubin

Feng

Hadley

et al. 2012

Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine

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We prospectively evaluated real‐time ultrasound speckle tracking for monitoring soft tissue motion for image‐guided radiotherapy. Two human volunteers and 1 patient with a proven hepatocellular carcinoma, who was being prepared for radiation therapy treatment, were scanned using a clinical ultrasound scanner modified to acquire and store radiofrequency signals. Scans were performed of the liver in the volunteers and the patient. In the patient, the speckle‐tracking results were compared to those measured on a treatment‐planning 4‐dimensional computed tomogram with tumors contoured manually in each phase and with estimates made by hand on gray scale ultrasound images. The surface of the right lung and the prostate were scanned in a volunteer. The liver and lung surface were scanned during respiration. To simulate prostate motion, the ultrasound probe was rocked in an anterior‐posterior direction. The correlation coefficients of all motion measurements were significantly correlated at all sites (P < .00001 for all sites) with 0 time delays. Ultrasound speckle‐tracking motion estimates of tumor motion were within 2 mm of estimates made by hand tracking on gray scale ultrasound images and the 4‐dimensional computed tomogram. The total tumor motion was greater than 20 mm. The angular displacement of the prostate was within 0.02 radians (1.1°) with displacements measured by hand. Speckle tracking could be used to monitor organ motion during radiotherapy.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 74%

Potential Use of Ultrasound Speckle Tracking for Motion Management During Radiotherapy

Rubin

Feng

Hadley

et al. 2012

Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine

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“…In the resulting images, the structural targets show consistently strong echoes while speckles show reduction in the brightness Consequently, the structural targets in spatially compounded images are enhanced and variations in the soft tissues due to speckle noise are averaged out [16]. This has been demonstrated both in vitro [14,17] and in vivo [11,[18][19][20][21][22]. These results indicate that spatial compounding can enhance the delineation of the boundaries and internal structure of lesions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 70%

“…Techniques such as spatial compounding and frequency compounding have been proposed to reduce the effect of the speckle. These compounding techniques have been widely investigated in research papers [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15], and spatial compounding in the image space has been used to reduce speckle brightness variations. In the spatial compounding technique, images are created from ultrasonic echo signals gathered from a number of different ultrasonic beam angles, and these images are merged using appropriate functions such as pixel intensity averaging to form a spatially compounded image.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial Compounding of Ultrasonic Diagnostic Images for Rotating Linear Probe with Geometric Parameter Error Compensation

Choi¹,

Bae²

2014

Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology

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-In ultrasonic medical imaging, spatial compounding of images is a technique where ultrasonic beam is steered to examine patient tissues in multiple angles. In the conventional ultrasonic diagnostic imaging, the steering of the ultrasonic beam is achieved electronically using the phased array transducer elements. In this paper, a spatial compounding approach is presented where the ultrasonic probe element is rotated mechanically and the beam steering is achieved mechanically. In the spatial compounding, target position is computed using the value of the rotation axis and the transducer array angular position. However, in the process of the rotation mechanism construction and the control system there arises the inevitable uncertainties in these values. These geometric parameter errors result in the target position error, and the consequence is a blurry compounded image. In order to reduce these target position errors, we present a spatial compounding scheme where error correcting transformation matrices are computed and applied to the raw images before spatial compounding to reduce the blurriness in the compounded image. The proposed scheme is illustrated using phantom and live scan images of human knee, and it is shown that the blurriness is effectively reduced.

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“…Local strain estimates around the same region-of-interest (ROI) acquired from different insonification angles are averaged to obtain a compound elastogram. This technique utilizes the same concept to reduce speckle noise as in conventional US imaging with angular compounding of the B-mode signals referred to as sono-CT (Burckhardt 1978;Trahey et al 1986;O'Donnell and Silverstein 1988;Wagner et al 1988;Ping 1997;Entrekin et al 2001;Tanter et al 2002). However, because strain is a tensor, strain estimates obtained from different angular views have to be appropriately weighted before compounding (Techavipoo et al 2004b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another advantage with spatial angular compounding is that the spatial resolution in the compounded images is not significantly degraded by the compounding process because the compounded signals arise from the same spatial location, but at different insonification angles. The variation in the insonification angle provides sufficient decorrelation to enable the improvement in the SNR e of the averaged strain estimate (Trahey et al 1986;O'Donnell and Silverstein 1988;Wagner et al 1988). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improvements in elastographic contrast-to-noise ratio using spatial-angular compounding

Techavipoo¹,

Varghese²

2005

Ultrasound in Medicine & Biology

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Spatial-angular compounding is a new technique developed for improving the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in elastography. Under this method, elastograms of a region-of-interest (ROI) are obtained from a spatially weighted average of local strain estimated along different insonification angles. In this article, we investigate the improvements in the strain contrast and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) of the spatially compounded elastograms. Spatial angular compounding is also applied and evaluated in conjunction with global temporal stretching. Quantitative experimental results obtained using a single-inclusion tissue-mimicking phantom demonstrate that the strain contrast reduces slightly but the CNR improves by around 8 to 13 dB. We also present experimental spatial angular compounding results obtained from an in vitro thermal lesion in canine liver tissue embedded in a gelatin phantom that demonstrate the improved visual characteristics (due to the improved CNR) of the compound elastogram. The experimental results provide guidelines for the practical range of maximum insonification angles and estimates of the optimum angular increment.

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Speckle Pattern Correlation with Lateral Aperture Translation: Experimental Results and Implications for Spatial Compounding

Cited by 235 publications

References 10 publications

Potential Use of Ultrasound Speckle Tracking for Motion Management During Radiotherapy

Potential Use of Ultrasound Speckle Tracking for Motion Management During Radiotherapy

Spatial Compounding of Ultrasonic Diagnostic Images for Rotating Linear Probe with Geometric Parameter Error Compensation

Improvements in elastographic contrast-to-noise ratio using spatial-angular compounding

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