Neural Operator-Based Framework for Time Efficient Denoising of Displacement Fields in Ultrasound Elastography

In ultrasound elastography, the noise present in the measured displacement fields has been a critical factor affecting the quality of the strain or elastic distribution reconstruction. Existing partial differential equation (PDE) based denoising algorithms can effectively remove noise to some extent but are limited by slow solving speeds. To address this challenge, we introduce a neural operator-based framework for denoising measured displacement fields in ultrasound elastography. By utilizing neural operators to learn a general solution operator for the denoising equation, the framework aims to achieve fast and accurate denoising of displacement fields. Experiments conducted on simulated data and tissue-mimicking phantom data demonstrate that this method performs comparably to traditional methods across various metrics. In particular, the proposed approach achieves processing speeds approximately 30 to 577 times faster than the finite difference method (FDM) in various data dimensions, making it a highly effective solution for rapid and scalable data processing in ultrasound elastography.