A new approach to improve the reconstruction quality in ultrasound elastography

The development of new medical imaging methods with high sensitivity and specificity for early cancer detection is of paramount interest in medical diagnostics. Since carcinomas are known to often show an increased stiffness compared to the surrounding healthy tissue, the so-called elastography is well-suited for their detection in soft tissue like the female breast. In elastography, the spatial distribution of elastic properties like the E-modulus is displayed as a two-dimensional map. In order to deduce the E-modulus distribution from the tissue´s response (i.e. the estimated internal tissue displacements) to an external compression force, the inverse problem governed by the equilibrium equations of linear elastostatics must be solved. In this paper we propose a new approach to reduce the influence of the spatially non-stationary displacement estimation variance on the E-modulus reconstruction, and thus improve the reconstruction quality.