Special GRASP Seminar – Weichuan Yu, Hong Kong University, “A Coupled Filtering Method for Solving the Feature-Motion Decorrelation Problem in Ultrasound Speckle Tracking”

Abstract: In ultrasound image-based tissue deformation analysis, feature-motion decorrelation causes feature tracking results fail to represent the underlying true tissue deformation. We propose a new coupled filtering method to solve the feature-motion decorrelation problem. After explicitly modeling image variations caused by tissue deformation, we filter the image before tissue deformation and the warped image after tissue deformation with a pair of filters, respectively. We show through theoretical derivation that the two filtered images are identical to each other. Since the coupled filtering method keeps tissue deformation parameters, feature-based tracking is able to accurately estimate the parameters of underlying tissue deformation. Experiments in elastography studies show that our method is superior over previous methods.