Initial clinical experience of an ultrasonic strain imaging system with novel noise-masking capability.

Quasistatic strain imaging is a form of elastography that can produce qualitative images of tissue stiffness with only software modifications to conventional ultrasound hardware. Unlike current commercial offerings, the novel strain-imaging system that is the subject of this paper displays regions of signal decorrelation using an overlaid colour mask and can also produce three-dimensional (3D) strain images. In illustrative studies of the breast, testis and thyroid, the colour mask is seen to reduce the potential to misinterpret noise as meaningful stiffness information, and also helps to differentiate cystic and solid lesions. High-quality imaging of the testis in vivo demonstrates that 3D strain imaging is feasible.