DinoMUSE: A DINOv2-guided Framework for Unsupervised Lateral Motion Estimation in Ultrasound Elastography

Xiyao Meng, Xingyue Wei, Baihua Luo, Bo Peng, Jianwen Luo

Quasi-static ultrasound elastography (USE) is a non-invasive imaging method for assessing soft tissue mechanical properties. Limited by low resolution, low sampling frequency and lack of phase information in the lateral direction, accurate lateral motion estimation remains a critical bottleneck in USE. Existing methods mainly rely on local image matching and physical constraints (such as tissue incompressibility assumption and effective Poisson's ratio), which lack sufficient contextual information. We present DinoMUSE, a DINO-guided mixture-of-experts (MoE) framework for unsupervised lateral motion estimation in USE. DinoMUSE incorporates high-level visual representations learned by DINOv2 into the motion estimation network to provide global contextual guidance. To facilitate effective interaction between DINOv2 features and local matching features, an MoE-based feature-fusion module adaptively transforms and integrates the two representations. Evaluations against NCC, GLUE, RAFT, and sPICTURE on simulation and in-vivo breast datasets show that DinoMUSE substantially improves lateral estimation accuracy while maintaining competitive axial performance. Specifically, DinoMUSE…