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Ultrasound image has already been proved to be a useful tool for non-invasive strain quantifications in soft tissue. While clinical applications only include cardiac imaging, the development of techniques suitable for musculoskeletal system is an active area of research. On this study, a technique for speckle tracking on ultrasound images using non-rigid image registration is presented. This approach is based on a single 2D+t registration procedure, in which the temporal changes on the B-mode speckle patterns are locally assessed. This allows estimating strain from ultrasound image sequences of tissues under deformation while imposing temporal smoothness in the deformation field, originating smooth strain curves. METHODS: The tracking algorithm was systematically tested on synthetic images and gelatin phantoms, under sinusoidal deformations with amplitudes between 0.5% and 4.0%, at frequencies between 0.25Hz and 2.0Hz. Preliminary tests were also performed on Achilles tendons isolated from human cadavers. RESULTS: The strain was estimated with deviations of -0.011%±0.053% on the synthetic images and agreements of ±0.28% on the phantoms. Some tests with real tendons show good tracking results. However, significant variability between the trials still exists. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed image registration methodology constitutes a robust tool for motion and deformation tracking in both simulated and real phantom data. Strain estimation in both cases reveals that the proposed method is accurate and provides good precision. Although the ex-vivo results are still preliminary, the potential of the proposed algorithm is promising. This suggests that further improvements, together with systematic testing, can lead to in-vivo and clinical applications. Almeida N.C.M., Slagmolen P., Barbosa D., Scheys L., Geukens L., Fukagawa S., Peers K., Bellemans J., Suetens P., D'hooge J., ''Tendon strain imaging using non-rigid image registration: a validation study'', Ultrasonic imaging, tomography, and therapy conference, part of SPIE medical imaging, February 5-6, 2012, San Diego, California, USA. ispartof: pages:832010- ispartof: SPIE Medical Imaging 2012 vol:8320 pages:832010- ispartof: SPIE Medical Imaging - Ultrasonic imaging, tomography, and therapy location:San Diego, California, USA date:5 Feb - 6 Feb 2012 status: published

The goal of radiotherapy is to deliver maximal dose to the tumor and minimal dose to the surrounding tissue. This requires accurate target definition. In sites were the tumor is difficult to see on the CT images, such as for rectal cancer, PET-CT imaging can be used to better define the target. If the information from multiple PETCT images with different tracers needs to be combined, a nonrigid registration is indispensable to compensate for rectal tissue deformations. Such registration is complicated by the presence of different volumes of bowel gas in the images to be registered. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of different nonrigid registration approaches by looking at the overlap of manually delineated rectum contours after registration. Using a B-spline transformation model, the results for two similarity measures, sum of squared differences and mutual information, either calculated over the entire image or on a region of interest are compared. Finally, we also assess the effect of the registration direction. We show that the combination of MI with a region of interest is best able to cope with residual rectal contrast and differences in bowel filling. We also show that for optimal performance the registration direction should be chosen depending on the difference in bowel filling in the images to be registered.