A novel image formation method for ultrasonic strain imaging.

This paper presents a new method for forming high-quality ultrasonic strain images. To achieve this goal, three radiofrequency echo frames are selected by an automated performance assessment method and used to generate two parent strain images located in the same physical grid from which a high quality composite strain image may be calculated by averaging. The automatic performance evaluation method combines the consistency among the two parent strain images and the accuracy of motion tracking into a single summary "displacement quality measure." The proposed algorithm is evaluated with datasets acquired from in vivo breast tissue data. Our results show that that the proposed strain formation method shows substantial potential to outperform other methods available in the literature.