  Ultrasound poroelastography is a cost-effective non-invasive imaging
technique, which is able to reconstruct several mechanical parameters of cancer
and normal tissue such as Young's modulus, Poisson's ratio, interstitial
permeability and vascular permeability. To estimate the permeabilities,
estimation of the strain time constant (TC) is required, which is a challenging
task because of non-linearity of the exponential strain curve and noise present
in the experimental data. Moreover, noise in many strain frames becomes very
high because of motion artifacts from the sonographer, animal/patient and/or
the environment. Therefore, using these frames in computation of strain TC can
lead to inaccurate estimates of the mechanical parameters. In this letter, we
introduce a cubic spline based interpolation method, which uses only the good
frames (frame of high SNR) to reconstruct the information of the bad frames
(frames of low SNR) and estimate the strain TC. We prove with finite element
simulation that the proposed reconstruction method can improve the estimation
accuracy of the strain TC by 46% in comparison to the estimates from noisy
data, and 37% in comparison to the estimates from Kalman filtered data at an
SNR of 30dB. Based on the high accuracy of the proposed method in estimating
strain TC from poroelastography data, the proposed method can be preferred
technique by the clinicians and researchers interested in non-invasive imaging
of tissue mechanical parameters.
