Ultrasound Elastography Imaging (UEI) is one of the in vivo stiffness measurement methods for human tissues. Since stiffness is highly correlated with pathology of tissue, measurement of stiffness could be helpful in diagnosis of cancer in breast, thyroid, prostate and liver. UEI involves, applying a small external compression on tissue of interest and then measuring the deformation using ultrasound imaging. Contrast transfer efficiency (CTE) is defined as the ability of any imaging technique to represent the actual modulus ratio in to a reasonable image contrast. In this work, a study was carried out to investigate the contrast transfer efficiency of ultrasound Elastography Imaging (UEI) in characterizing different classes of inclusions using simulated tissue mimicking phantoms. Using finite element method, phantom was simulated with embedded inclusions of varying stiffness to represent different stages of cancer. Results show that mean CTE is comparatively better for low modulus contrast lesions than high modulus contrast lesions. Results are validated with clinical images and have good agreement with literature also. Copyright © 2014 American Scientific Publishers All rights reserved.