Supervised Classification of the Accuracy of the Time Delay Estimation in Ultrasound Elastography

The accuracy of time-delay estimation (TDE) in ultrasound elastography is usually measured by calculating the value of normalized cross correlation (NCC) at the estimated displacement. NCC value, however, could be very high at a displacement estimate with large error, a well-known problem in TDE referred to as peak-hopping. Furthermore, NCC value could suffer from jitter error, which is due to electric noise and signal decorrelation. Herein, we propose a novel method to assess the accuracy of TDE by investigating the NCC profile around the estimated time-delay. We extract several features from the NCC profile, and utilize support vector machine to classify peak-hopping and jitter error. The results on simulation, phantom, and in vivo data show the significant improvement of the proposed algorithm compared to the state of the art techniques.

[1]  M. O’Donnell,et al.  Internal displacement and strain imaging using ultrasonic speckle tracking , 1994, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[2]  Jingfeng Jiang,et al.  Recent results in nonlinear strain and modulus imaging. , 2011, Current medical imaging reviews.

[3]  W. Walker,et al.  A fundamental limit on delay estimation using partially correlated speckle signals , 1995, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[4]  David Cosgrove,et al.  WFUMB Guidelines and Recommendations on the Clinical Use of Ultrasound Elastography: Part 5. Prostate. , 2017, Ultrasound in medicine & biology.

[5]  Graham M. Treece,et al.  Uniform precision ultrasound strain imaging , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[6]  K. Boone,et al.  Effect of skin impedance on image quality and variability in electrical impedance tomography: a model study , 1996, Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing.

[7]  A. Oberai,et al.  Recovering vector displacement estimates in quasistatic elastography using sparse relaxation of the momentum equation , 2015, Inverse problems in science and engineering.

[8]  Y. Raghavender Rao,et al.  APPLICATION OF NORMALIZED CROSS CORRELATION TO IMAGE REGISTRATION , 2014 .

[9]  F. Kallel,et al.  A Least-Squares Strain Estimator for Elastography , 1997, Ultrasonic imaging.

[10]  Tsuyoshi Shiina,et al.  WFUMB guidelines and recommendations for clinical use of ultrasound elastography: Part 3: liver. , 2015, Ultrasound in medicine & biology.

[11]  Graham M. Treece,et al.  Stable, Intelligible Ultrasonic Strain Imaging , 2008, Ultrasound.

[12]  M. Insana,et al.  An information-based machine learning approach to elasticity imaging , 2017, Biomechanics and modeling in mechanobiology.

[13]  J. Arendt.  Paper presented at the 10th Nordic-Baltic Conference on Biomedical Imaging: Field: A Program for Simulating Ultrasound Systems , 1996 .

[14]  Tom Fawcett,et al.  An introduction to ROC analysis , 2006, Pattern Recognit. Lett..

[15]  J. Ophir,et al.  An adaptive strain estimator for elastography , 1998, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[16]  Tsuyoshi Shiina,et al.  WFUMB guidelines and recommendations for clinical use of ultrasound elastography: Part 2: breast. , 2015, Ultrasound in medicine & biology.

[17]  Kathryn R Nightingale,et al.  Improving the robustness of time-of-flight based shear wave speed reconstruction methods using RANSAC in human liver in vivo. , 2010, Ultrasound in medicine & biology.

[18]  Leo Breiman,et al.  Random Forests , 2001, Machine Learning.

[19]  Gregory D. Hager,et al.  Real-Time Regularized Ultrasound Elastography , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[20]  David Cosgrove,et al.  WFUMB Guidelines and Recommendations on the Clinical Use of Ultrasound Elastography: Part 4. Thyroid. , 2017, Ultrasound in medicine & biology.

[21]  M. O’Donnell,et al.  Reduced peak-hopping artifacts in ultrasonic strain estimation using the Viterbi algorithm , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[22]  Frédérique Frouin,et al.  Automatic assessment of shear wave elastography quality and measurement reliability in the liver. , 2015, Ultrasound in medicine & biology.

[23]  Olivier Basset,et al.  2-D Locally Regularized Tissue Strain Estimation From Radio-Frequency Ultrasound Images: Theoretical Developments and Results on Experimental Data , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[24]  J. Ophir,et al.  Theoretical bounds on strain estimation in elastography , 1995, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[25]  G. Clifford Carter,et al.  Coherence and time delay estimation : an applied tutorial for research, development, test, and evaluation engineers , 1993 .

[26]  Thomas Deffieux,et al.  Quantitative assessment of breast lesion viscoelasticity: initial clinical results using supersonic shear imaging. , 2008, Ultrasound in medicine & biology.

[27]  Graham M. Treece,et al.  Real-time quasi-static ultrasound elastography , 2011, Interface Focus.

[28]  R. Chang,et al.  Automatic slice selection and diagnosis of breast strain elastography. , 2014, Medical physics.

[29]  J. Ophir,et al.  Elastography: A Quantitative Method for Imaging the Elasticity of Biological Tissues , 1991, Ultrasonic imaging.

[30]  A. Weiss,et al.  Fundamental limitations in passive time delay estimation--Part I: Narrow-band systems , 1983 .

[31]  Ruey-Feng Chang,et al.  Automatic selection of representative slice from cine-loops of real-time sonoelastography for classifying solid breast masses. , 2011, Ultrasound in medicine & biology.

[32]  Gregory D. Hager,et al.  Ultrasound Elastography: A Dynamic Programming Approach , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[33]  Alexander J. Smola,et al.  Support Vector Method for Function Approximation, Regression Estimation and Signal Processing , 1996, NIPS.

[34]  M M Doyley,et al.  Model-based elastography: a survey of approaches to the inverse elasticity problem , 2012, Physics in medicine and biology.

[35]  Rongmin Xia,et al.  Dynamic frame pairing in real-time freehand elastography , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control.

[36]  T. Varghese,et al.  A theoretical framework for performance characterization of elastography: the strain filter , 1997, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[37]  H. Ermert,et al.  A time-efficient and accurate strain estimation concept for ultrasonic elastography using iterative phase zero estimation , 1999, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[38]  Tsuyoshi Shiina,et al.  WFUMB guidelines and recommendations for clinical use of ultrasound elastography: Part 1: basic principles and terminology. , 2015, Ultrasound in medicine & biology.

[39]  Kathryn R Nightingale,et al.  Acoustic radiation force-based elasticity imaging methods , 2011, Interface Focus.

[40]  D. Louis Collins,et al.  Adaptive Voxel, Texture and Temporal Conditional Random Fields for Detection of Gad-Enhancing Multiple Sclerosis Lesions in Brain MRI , 2013, MICCAI.

[41]  Abbas Samani,et al.  Towards clinical prostate ultrasound elastography using full inversion approach. , 2014, Medical physics.

[42]  T. Hall,et al.  A novel performance descriptor for ultrasonic strain imaging: a preliminary study , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.

[43]  Jahan Tavakkoli,et al.  Performance study of a new time-delay estimation algorithm in ultrasonic echo signals and ultrasound elastography. , 2016, Ultrasonics.

[44]  Andrew H. Gee,et al.  A quality-guided displacement tracking algorithm for ultrasonic elasticity imaging , 2009, Medical Image Anal..

[45]  Septimiu E. Salcudean,et al.  Motion Estimation in Ultrasound Images Using Time Domain Cross Correlation With Prior Estimates , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[46]  Frédérique Frouin,et al.  Ultrasound elastography based on multiscale estimations of regularized displacement fields , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[47]  Gregory D. Hager,et al.  Ultrasound elastography using multiple images , 2014, Medical Image Anal..

[48]  Bhaskara Rao Chintada,et al.  A Novel Elastographic Frame Quality Indicator and its use in Automatic Representative-Frame Selection from a Cine Loop. , 2017, Ultrasound in medicine & biology.

[49]  Richard W Prager,et al.  An intelligent interface for freehand strain imaging. , 2008, Ultrasound in medicine & biology.

[50]  Hassan Rivaz,et al.  Edge-preserving ultrasonic strain imaging with uniform precision , 2015, 2015 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC).