Noise minimization by multicompression approach in elasticity imaging

Breast lesion visibility in static strain imaging ultimately is noise limited. When correlation and related techniques are applied to estimate local displacements between two echo frames recorded before and after a deformation, target contrast increases linearly with the amount of deformation applied. However, above some deformation threshold, decorrelation noise increases more than contrast such that lesion visibility is severely reduced. Multicompression methods avoid this problem by accumulating displacements from many small deformations to provide the same net increase in lesion contrast as one large deformation but with minimal decorrelation noise. Unfortunately multicompression approaches accumulate echo noise (electronic and sampling) with each deformation step as contrast builds so that lesion visibility can again be reduced if the applied deformation increment is too small. This paper uses signal models and analysis techniques to develop multicompression strategies that minimize strain image noise. The analysis predicts that displacement variance is minimal when the applied strain increment is 0.0035 for typical breast imaging conditions. Predictions are verified experimentally with gelatin phantoms. For in vivo breast imaging, a strain increment as low as 0.0015 is recommended for minimal noise because of the high heterogeneity of the breast tissue.