An efficient temperature estimation using optical-flow in ultrasound B-mode digital images

A two-dimensional temperature estimation method has been proposed based on the detection of shifts in speckle pattern location of ultrasound B-Mode digital images from a region of tissue undergoing thermal therapy. The speckle pattern shifts were due to the local temperature dependence of sound speed and thermal expansion in the heated region. Here in this paper we made use of optical-flow in order to achieve a better accuracy and lower computational burden. The accuracy of measurement of the temperature has been tested on simulated images and it is experimentally validated using tissue mimicking phantom. Good agreement was obtained from the simulated sequences (mean difference= 0.1 and pick error was 0.6). The proposed method was found computationally faster compared to our previous work which was based on the cross correlation algorithm.