Spatial angular compounding for elastography without the incompressibility assumption

Spatial-angular compounding is a new technique that enables the reduction of noise artifacts in ultrasound elastography. Previous results using spatial angular compounding, however, were based on the use of the tissue incompressibility assumption. Compounded elastograms were obtained from a spatially-weighted average of local strain estimated from radiofrequency echo signals acquired at different insonification angles. In this paper, we present a new method for reducing the noise artifacts in the axial strain elastogram utilizing a least-squares approach on the angular displacement estimates that does not use the incompressibility assumption. This method produces axial strain elastograms with higher image quality, compared to noncompounded axial strain elastograms, and is referred to as the least-squares angular-compounding approach for elastography. To distinguish between these two angular compounding methods, the spatial-angular compounding with angular weighting based on the tissue incompressibility assumption is referred to as weighted compounding. In this paper, we compare the performance of the two angular-compounding techniques for elastography using beam steering on a linear-array transducer. Quantitative experimental results demonstrate that least-squares compounding provides comparable but smaller improvements in both the elastographic signal-to-noise ratio and the contrast-to-noise ratio, as compared to the weighted-compounding method. Ultrasound simulation results suggest that the least-squares compounding method performs better and provide accurate and robust results when compared to the weighted compounding method, in the case where the incompressibility assumption does not hold.