Three-dimensional Ultrasound Elasticity Imaging on an Automated Breast Volume Scanning System

• Published in: Ultrasonic imaging Vol. 39; no. 6; pp. 369 - 392
• Main Authors: Wang, Yuqi, Nasief, Haidy G., Kohn, Sarah, Milkowski, Andy, Clary, Tom, Barnes, Stephen, Barbone, Paul E., Hall, Timothy J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.11.2017
• Subjects: Algorithms; Breast - anatomy & histology; Breast - diagnostic imaging; Elasticity Imaging Techniques - methods; Female; Humans; Imaging, Three-Dimensional - methods; Motion; Organ Size; Pattern Recognition, Automated - methods; Phantoms, Imaging; Ultrasonography, Mammary - methods; displacement estimation; 3D elastography; 3D strain; motion tracking; elasticity imaging
• ISSN: 0161-7346; 1096-0910; 1096-0910
• DOI: 10.1177/0161734617712238

Ultrasound elasticity imaging has demonstrated utility in breast imaging, but it is typically performed with handheld transducers and two-dimensional imaging. Two-dimensional (2D) elastography images tissue stiffness of only a plane and hence suffers from errors due to out-of-plane motion, whereas three-dimensional (3D) data acquisition and motion tracking can be used to track out-of-plane motion that is lost in 2D elastography systems. A commercially available automated breast volume scanning system that acquires 3D ultrasound data with precisely controlled elevational movement of the 1D array ultrasound transducer was employed in this study. A hybrid guided 3D motion-tracking algorithm was developed that first estimated the displacements in one plane using a modified quality-guided search method, and then performed an elevational guided-search for displacement estimation in adjacent planes. To assess the performance of the method, 3D radiofrequency echo data were acquired with this system from a phantom and from an in vivo human breast. For both experiments, the axial displacement fields were smooth and high cross-correlation coefficients were obtained in most of the tracking region. The motion-tracking performance of the new method was compared with a correlation-based exhaustive-search method. For all motion-tracking volume pairs, the average motion-compensated cross-correlation values obtained by the guided-search motion-tracking method were equivalent to those by the exhaustive-search method, and the computation time was about a factor of 10 lesser. Therefore, the proposed 3D ultrasound elasticity imaging method was a more efficient approach to produce a high quality of 3D ultrasound strain image.