Freehand Strain Image Using Alternate Transmit Frequency

Elastography suffers from artifacts noise, which degrades the detection and diagnosis of cancers in breast, prostate, thyroid, and et al. This paper introduces a new approach, Transmit-side Frequency Compounding for freehand strain image(TSFC), which reduces artifact noise of elastography efficiently. N different center frequency pulses are transmitted alternately to ROI in the process of tissue compression. Frequency sub-elastogram is produced from the same frequency pre- and post-compression echo pairs, i.e. ith frame and (i+N)th frame. Then N consecutive different frequency sub-elastograms are compounded to produce the final elastogram. A phantom experiment validates the noise reduction obtained by the proposed technique. Compounded elastogram of phantom obtained show improvement not only in SNRe but also in CNRe.