A Unified Approach to Improve the Computation Time and Image Quality of Ultrasound Strain Imaging

Abstract

Medical science relies on technology now more than ever. For both diagnosis and treatment blessing of technology is exploited. Diagnosis of disease using technology comes in various forms. Imaging is a particularly attractive diagnosis methodology. Among the existing diagnostic imaging techniques ultrasound has gained much popularity over the years. Apart from the regular ultrasound imaging techniques ultrasound has some special use. Elastography is such an application of ultrasound. It is actually the imaging of the stiffness of the tissue. Elastography is particularly efficient in diagnosing early cancer particularly breast and prostate cancer. For example, breast cancer is diagnosed by invasive biopsy. But elastography can reduce the rate of biopsy since a large fraction of the tumors of breast are found to be benign. Unlike biopsy elastography provides instant result. It relieves the patient from psychological stress to wait for the result. But elastography is much of a qualitative technique. It can be unreliable at some cases. That’s why extensive research is being performed to improve its quality. In our thesis we have worked on two different aspects of the research. We have presented a software tool that can be used for improving the computation time in elastography. Also, we have proposed a concept of using smooth window functions to improve the image quality and presented some experimental results.