Guided Filtering of ARFI Displacement Data for Shear Wave Speed Estimation

Acoustic radiation force impulse (ARFI) imaging enables tissue stiffness characterization by inducing shear waves with a push pulse and subsequently tracking the resulting tissue displacements using plane-wave pulses. Such displacement data can then be utilized to get a 2D map of the estimated shear wave speed (SWS) values within an imaged region of interest. This is a challenging task because displacement estimates are typically noisy. To mitigate the impact of noise, we propose to apply guided image filtering that relies on two types of displacement data: one based on progressive referencing (i.e., using correlation between consecutive beamformed frames), and the other based on fixed referencing (i.e., using correlation with respect to some fixed pre-push frame). The latter serves as the source of guidance images that help denoise the progressive-referencing data prior to SWS estimation. This technique was applied to the ARFI data of the IEEE UFFC-JS 2024 a-MEM Challenge.