Park Suhyun, Aglyamov Salavat R, Scott W Guy, Emelianov Stanislav Y
Department of Biomedical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control. 2007 May;54(5):987-95. doi: 10.1109/tuffc.2007.344.
In elasticity imaging, the ultrasound frames acquired during tissue deformation are analyzed to estimate the internal displacements and strains. If the deformation rate is high, high-frame-rate imaging techniques are required to avoid the severe decorrelation between the neighboring ultrasound images. In these high-frame-rate techniques, however, the broader and less focused ultrasound beam is transmitted and, hence, the image quality is degraded. We quantitatively compared strain images obtained using conventional and ultrafast ultrasound imaging methods. The performance of the elasticity imaging was evaluated using custom-designed, numerical simulations. Our results demonstrate that signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) and spatial resolutions in displacement and strain images acquired using conventional and ultrafast ultrasound imaging are comparable. This study suggests that the high-frame-rate ultrasound imaging can be reliably used in elasticity imaging if frame rate is critical.
在弹性成像中，会对组织变形过程中采集的超声帧进行分析，以估计内部位移和应变。如果变形速率很高，则需要采用高帧率成像技术，以避免相邻超声图像之间出现严重的去相关性。然而，在这些高帧率技术中，发射的超声束更宽且聚焦性更差，因此图像质量会下降。我们对使用传统超声成像方法和超快超声成像方法获得的应变图像进行了定量比较。使用定制设计的数值模拟评估了弹性成像的性能。我们的结果表明，使用传统超声成像和超快超声成像获取的位移和应变图像中的信噪比（SNR）、对比噪声比（CNR）和空间分辨率相当。这项研究表明，如果帧率至关重要，高帧率超声成像可以可靠地用于弹性成像。
