Robust elasticity imaging using external tracker

The potential of ultrasound elasticity imaging (USEI) have been shown in numerous medical applications especially in detection and diagnosis of cancer. However, the widespread use of this imaging technique in clinical setups is limited by its dependency to the user expertise. Insufficient skill in freehand palpation of the tissue easily translates into poor quality of the images. In this paper, the synchronized data from an external tracker is employed to reduce this dependency and to increase the overall quality of the images. Based on the information from the external tracker, pairs of RF frames suitable for USEI are selected from the pool of incoming RF sequences. The selection of RF frames is tuned to match the known properties of the underlying elasticity estimation technique. Experiments on breast phantom are carried to evaluate the performance of the proposed method.