3-D ultrasonic strain imaging based on a linear scanning system

This paper introduces a 3-D strain imaging method based on a freehand linear scanning mode. We designed a linear sliding track with a position sensor and a height-adjustable holder to constrain the movement of an ultrasound probe in a freehand manner. When moving the probe along the sliding track, the corresponding positional measures for the probe are transmitted via a wireless communication module based on Bluetooth in real time. In a single examination, the probe is scanned in two sweeps in which the height of the probe is adjusted by the holder to collect the pre- and postcompression radio-frequency echoes, respectively. To generate a 3-D strain image, a volume cubic in which the voxels denote relative strains for tissues is defined according to the range of the two sweeps. With respect to the post-compression frames, several slices in the volume are determined and the pre-compression frames are re-sampled to precisely correspond to the post-compression frames. Thereby, a strain estimation method based on minimizing a cost function using dynamic programming is used to obtain the 2-D strain image for each pair of frames from the re-sampled pre-compression sweep and the post-compression sweep, respectively. A software system is developed for volume reconstruction, visualization, and measurement of the 3-D strain images. The experimental results show that high-quality 3-D strain images of phantom and human tissues can be generated by the proposed method, indicating that the proposed system can be applied for real clinical applications (e.g., musculoskeletal assessments).