Temporal guided search for elastography motion tracking

By assuming spatial continuity in tissue displacements, guided search and regularization methods in ultrasonic motion tracking have been shown to reduce “peak-hop” tracking errors. These methods can also be applied to temporal displacement continuity. Four algorithms are proposed that exploit either the continuity of tissue velocity over time or the necessary consistency between displacement results from different frame pairings. Preliminary tests on freehand phantom and tissue data show that three of these algorithms consistently reduce peak-hop errors relative to standard block-matching and have comparable performance to a previously published spatial regularization algorithm.