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Texture Generation for Photoacoustic Elastography

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Abstract

Elastographic imaging is a widely used technique which can in principle be implemented on top of every imaging modality. In elastography, the specimen is exposed to a force causing local displacements, and imaging is performed before and during the displacement experiment. The computed mechanical displacements can either directly be used for clinical diagnosis or deliver a basis for the deduction of material parameters. Photoacoustic imaging is an emerging image modality, which exhibits functional and morphological contrast. However, opposed to ultrasound imaging, for instance, it is considered a modality which is not suited for elastography, because it does not reveal speckle patterns. However, this is somehow counterintuitive, because photoacoustic imaging makes available the whole frequency spectrum as opposed to single frequency standard ultrasound imaging. In this work, we show that in fact artificial speckle patterns can be introduced by using only a band-limited part of the measurement data. We also show that after introduction of artificial speckle patterns, deformation estimation can be implemented more reliably in photoacoustic imaging.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Joyce McLaughlin, Paul Beard, and Ben Cox for helpful discussions and express our gratitude to the referees for their stimulating remarks. We acknowledge support from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) in Projects S10505-N20 and P26687-N25.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computational Science Center, University of Vienna, Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1, 1090 , Vienna, Austria

    Thomas Glatz, Otmar Scherzer & Thomas Widlak

  2. Radon Institute of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Altenberger Str. 69, 4040 , Linz, Austria

    Otmar Scherzer

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  1. Thomas Glatz
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Correspondence to Thomas Glatz.

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Glatz, T., Scherzer, O. & Widlak, T. Texture Generation for Photoacoustic Elastography. J Math Imaging Vis 52, 369–384 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10851-015-0561-4

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