Learning the implicit strain reconstruction in ultrasound elastography using privileged information

Quasi-static ultrasound elastography is an importance imaging technology to assess the conditions of various diseases through reconstructing the tissue strain from radio frequency data. State-of-the-art strain reconstruction techniques suffer from the inexperienced user unfriendliness, high model bias, and low effectiveness-to-efficiency ratio. The three challenges result from the explicitness characteristic (i.e. explicit formulation of the reconstruction model) in these techniques. For these challenges, we are the first to develop an implicit strain reconstruction framework by a deep neural network architecture. However, the classic neural network methods are unsuitable to the strain reconstruction task because they are difficult to impose any direct influence on the intermediate state of the learning process. This may lead the map learned by the neural network to be biased with the desired map. In order to correct the intermediate state of the learning process, our framework proposes the learning-using-privileged-information (LUPI) paradigm with causality in the network. It provides the causal privileged information besides the training examples to help the network learning, while makes these privileged information unavailable at the test stage. This improvement can narrow the search region of the map learned by the network, and thus prompts the network to evolve towards the actual ultrasound elastography process. Moreover, in order to ensure the causality in LUPI, our framework proposes a physically-based data generation strategy to produce the triplets of privileged information, training examples and labels. This data generation process can approximately describes the actual ultrasound elastography process by the numerical simulation based on the tissue biomechanics and ultrasound physics. It thus can build the causal relationship between the privileged information and training examples/labels. It can also address the medical data insufficiency problem. The performance of our framework has been validated on 100 simulation data, 42 phantom data and 4 real clinical data by comparing with the ground truth performed by an ultrasound simulation system and four state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results show that our framework is well agreed (average bias is 0.065 for strain reconstruction) with the ground truth, as well as superior to these state-of-the-art methods. These results can demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in the strain reconstruction. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.