A lateral tracking based phase zero estimation method for ultrasonic elastography

Compared with other methods for elastography, iterative phase zero estimation (PZ) is more suitable for real time elastography due to its less computational complexity. However, the iterative result of PZ seriously relies on the iterative initial value. If the deviation of the previous iterative result is too large, all of the following estimations may go wrong. To solve this problem, a lateral tracking based phase zero estimation method (LTPZ) is proposed in this paper. LTPZ can reduce the deviation of the iterative result through modifying the iterative initial values, and detect the inclusion accurately even when strain is large. To improve the axial resolution, the searching window size changes adaptively with the depth. The simulation experiments demonstrate that LTPZ can obtain more accurate estimation results when strain is 1% and 3.5% and show better robustness.