Reduction of the decorrelation effect due to tissue lateral displacement by 2-D spatial comprehensive correlation in elastography

The cross-correlation based ultrasonic elastography is limited for application due to distortion of the echo waveform by tissue lateral deformation during axial compression. To reduce this kind of decorrelation effect, a time-efficient method called a 2-D spatial comprehensive correlation algorithm is proposed. The basic idea of this method is to combine spatial adjacent cross-correlation functions as a comprehensive time shift estimator. A simulation model based on finite element analysis is applied to evaluate the method proposed in this work. Results indicate that this method can reduce the decorrelation effect of tissue lateral displacement with less increase of computation.