Supervised Classification of the Accuracy of the Time Delay Estimation in Ultrasound Elastography

IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control. 2018 Jan;65(1):21-29. doi: 10.1109/TUFFC.2017.2769118.

Abstract

The accuracy of time-delay estimation (TDE) in ultrasound elastography is usually measured by calculating the value of normalized cross correlation (NCC) at the estimated displacement. NCC value, however, could be very high at a displacement estimate with large error, a well-known problem in TDE referred to as peak-hopping. Furthermore, NCC value could suffer from jitter error, which is due to electric noise and signal decorrelation. Herein, we propose a novel method to assess the accuracy of TDE by investigating the NCC profile around the estimated time-delay. We extract several features from the NCC profile, and utilize support vector machine to classify peak-hopping and jitter error. The results on simulation, phantom, and in vivo data show the significant improvement of the proposed algorithm compared to the state of the art techniques.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't