Abstract: The invention provides for the visualisation of conventional and parametric images of materials as they are progressively distorted during examination. A conventional image is displayed simultaneously alongside one or more parametric images derived from the original image data, with the parametric images displaying mechanical properties such as elasticity and mobility. The mobility values are calculated from the tracking error obtained from a motion or strain estimation algorithm applied to a sequence of image frames. The values of elasticity and mobility are displayed in a colour overlay on the conventional image background and the transparency of the overlay is varied according to the parameter values to de-emphasise less relevant values.