K2. Motion Estimation for Ultrasound Elastography U sing Optimized Block Matching with Lateral Continuity Correction

The displacement estimation phase in ultrasound elastography is similar to the motion estimation problem in the video compression domain. Block matching can then be applied to successive ultrasound radio rrequency frames to get displacement fjelds. We utilize the inherent continuity in the soft tissue to apply an optimized version of exhaustive block matching to elasticity phantoms to generate displacement fjelds. Furthermore, we impose lateral continuity on displacements of each row in the reference image to remove false peaks in the optimized exhaustive search. Application of Linear least squares differentiation to the resultant axial displacement fjeld yields promising results. The resultant strain fjeld is comparable to a published result. We present quantitative assessment for the resulting displacement fields and the runtime of the motion estimation algorithms.