| Medical ultrasound research has experienced a renaissance in the past decade leading to innovations in flow mapping, elasticity and thermal imaging, measurement of optical properties, beamforming, and image enhancement. In this thesis, we focus on ultrasound elastography, an emerging imaging modality with great potential to become a part of several ultrasound diagnostic applications. Elastography images the stiffness of soft tissue by applying a mechanical stimulus and estimating the disturbance created by this stimulus. In freehand elastography, soft tissue is palpated by hand using the ultrasound transducer. The elastography image is generated by comparing the pre- and post-compression images to form a displacement map which is then differentiated to produce the final strain map. To achieve the best result in freehand elastography, the sonographer must compress and decompress the tissue uniformly in a specific direction with adequate compression. This can be a difficult task even for trained users. A small rotational or out-of-plane motion in the collected ultrasound frames can render them unusable for elastography. This has made freehand elastography highly qualitative and user-dependent.;We tackle this issue by incorporating the extra information from a position sensor attached to the ultrasound transducer. Our aim is to show that the localization information of ultrasound images may be utilized to improve the quality and reliability of freehand elastography. For this purpose, we have developed a frame selection scheme that finds pairs of images with optimal compression and minimal lateral and out-of-plane displacement. Relying on the localization information, our algorithm merges multiple strain images computed from the selected frame pairs. This method is applicable to both 2D and 3D elastography. Our 3D elastography does not require for the transducer to be held still during the acquisition of each volume. Instead, the sonographer freely palpates the tissue similar to the 2D case while a series of volumes are being collected. For applications such as needle ablation therapy, it is also possible to palpate the tissue internally using the ablation needle. In this case, we have assessed the feasibility of incorporating the localization information about the tip of the needle in elastography. We have evaluated these methods using tissue mimicking phantom, animal, and patient experiments. Our results suggest that in challenging clinical conditions, the proposed methods are capable of producing high-quality strain images. |
