Diagnosis of prostate carcinoma using multicompression strain imaging: data acquisition and first in vivo results

We present a new system for the acquisition of ultrasonic multicompression strain images of the human prostate in vivo. A mechanical force applied to the tip of an ultrasonic transrectal probe is measured continuously and ultrasonic RF-images are acquired consecutively at specified levels of tissue compression. An iterative phase-zero estimation method is used to obtain time delay estimates and the corresponding strain images from the acquired image sequence. We present phantom measurements as well as first in vivo results which are in good agreement to histological findings. Lateral tissue motion artifacts are corrected by a novel local companding method