A strain-based ultrasound elastography using phase shift with prior estimates and meshfree shape function

A strain-based elastography is developed to identify lesions from the phase information of ultrasonic radio frequency (RF) signals in this study: a phase shift method using prior estimates is first applied to recover the axial displacement from RF signals, followed by a meshfree method to compute a smooth strain field from estimated displacement. The numerical complexity of our phase shift method can be reduced largely after using prior estimates without losing the accuracy comparing to popular techniques. Furthermore, our meshfree-based strain estimator can maintain the C¹ continuity when calculating the strain map from the axial displacement. Each step of our framework is verified in synthetic data and real phantom data collected by ultrasound machine separately. The performance of our framework is also compared to popular techniques in ultrasound elastography in term of accuracy and efficiency. Overall, our framework shows a great potential in real time ultrasound elastography because of its higher efficiency and accuracy.