A novel method for ultrasound elastography using the mutual information and the phase information

Ultrasound elastography is a technique used for clinical imaging of soft tissue by deformation estimation. This paper introduces a 2-D strain imaging technique using the mutual information and the phase information. This paper introduces a novel 2D strain imaging technique based on the mutual information between pre and post compressed radio frequency (RF) signals to define time delays. The mutual information and the phase information between two corresponding windows around the samples of the pre-and the post-compressed signals are employed to generate a similarity measurement. The time delay is considered to be the time shift between two windows for which the similarity degree between pre-and the post-compressed signals reaches a maximum. Another two methods used to estimate displacements are compared to our method in this paper. The effectiveness of the proposed method is investigated through phantom experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed method can estimate displacement map effectively.