A method for vector displacement estimation with ultrasound images and its application for thyroid nodular disease. Basarab, A., Liebgott, H., Morestin, F., Lyshchik, A., Higashi, T., Asato, R., & Delacharte, P. Medical Image Analysis, 12(3):259–274, Elsevier, http://www.elsevier.com/, 2008.
abstract   bibtex   
Ultrasound elastography is a promising imaging technique that can assist in diagnosis of thyroid cancer. However, the complexity of the tissue movements under freehand compression requires the use of a parametric displacement model and a specific estimation method adapted to sub-pixel motion. Therefore, the aim of this study was to develop a motion estimation method for ultrasound elastography and test its performances compared to a classical block matching technique. The proposed method, referred to as Bilinear Deformable Block Matching (BDBM), uses a bilinear model with eight parameters for controlling the local mesh deformation. In addition, a technique of motion initialization based on a triangle scan of the images adapted to ultrasound elastography is proposed. The BDBM method includes an iterative multi-scale process. This iterative approach is shown to decrease the absolute error of the displacement estimation by a factor of 1.4 when passing from 1 to 2 iterations. The method was tested on simulated images and the results show that absolute displacement estimation error was reduced by a factor of 4 compared to classical block matching. We applied the BDBM method on three experimental sets of data. In the first data set, a phantom designed for ultrasound elastography was used. The two other sets of data involve the thyroid gland and were acquired using freehand tissue compression by ultrasound probe of a clinical ultrasound scanner modified for research. A similarity measurement based on local cross-correlation shows that, for experimental data, the BDBM method outperforms the usual block matching.
@Article{ BaLiMoLyHiAsDe2008.1,
author = {Basarab, Adrian and Liebgott, Hervé and Morestin, Fabrice and Lyshchik, Andrej and Higashi, Tatsuya and Asato, Ryo and Delacharte, Philippe},
title = "{A method for vector displacement estimation with ultrasound images and its application for thyroid nodular disease}",
journal = {Medical Image Analysis},
publisher = {Elsevier},
address = {http://www.elsevier.com/},
year = {2008},
volume = {12},
number = {3},
pages = {259--274},
language = {anglais},
abstract = {Ultrasound elastography is a promising imaging technique that can assist in diagnosis of thyroid cancer. However, the complexity of the tissue movements under freehand compression requires the use of a parametric displacement model and a specific estimation method adapted to sub-pixel motion. Therefore, the aim of this study was to develop a motion estimation method for ultrasound elastography and test its performances compared to a classical block matching technique. The proposed method, referred to as Bilinear Deformable Block Matching (BDBM), uses a bilinear model with eight parameters for controlling the local mesh deformation. In addition, a technique of motion initialization based on a triangle scan of the images adapted to ultrasound elastography is proposed. The BDBM method includes an iterative multi-scale process. This iterative approach is shown to decrease the absolute error of the displacement estimation by a factor of 1.4 when passing from 1 to 2 iterations. The method was tested on simulated images and the results show that absolute displacement estimation error was reduced by a factor of 4 compared to classical block matching. We applied the BDBM method on three experimental sets of data. In the first data set, a phantom designed for ultrasound elastography was used. The two other sets of data involve the thyroid gland and were acquired using freehand tissue compression by ultrasound probe of a clinical ultrasound scanner modified for research. A similarity measurement based on local cross-correlation shows that, for experimental data, the BDBM method outperforms the usual block matching.}
}

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