Parametric Deformable Block Matching for Ultrasound Imaging

Abstract

This paper investigates motion tracking for ultrasound imaging. The proposed method is adapted to ultrasonic images and uses a bilinear motion model for controlling the local mesh deformation. We use an iterative multi-scale approach which is shown to considerably decrease the estimated motion error when we pass from 1 to 2 iterations. The proposed algorithm is tested in two medical applications. First, we use it to track tissue motion for ultrasound elastography. The second application is related to slow blood flow estimation with high frequency ultrasound imaging. In both cases, our technique considerably improves the quality of the results compared to classical block matching (BM).