Elastic modulus imaging using optical flow and image registration

Elastography, the imaging technique for estimating the elastic tissue properties, or more specifically elastic modulus imaging, are becoming important diagnosis tools in computer aided diagnosis system, specially focusing on ultrasound and MRI images. This technique still presents unsolved challenges in the analysis of deformations in sequences of images. The aim of this paper is twofold: to evaluate the applicability of the deformation field obtained by state of the art optical flow and image registration algorithms for elastic modulus imaging and to quantitatively evaluate two different methods for estimation of the elastic modulus distribution. Results show that optical-flow methods provide a slightly better reconstruction and that the reconstruction has been shown to be more accurate using the method proposed by Sumi et al.