The clinical feasibility of 2D elastography methods is hindered by the requirement that the operator avoid out-of-plane motion of the ultrasound image during palpation, and also by the lack of volumetric elastography measurements In this paper, we develop, evaluate a 3D elastography method operating on volumetric data acquired from a 3D probe Our method is based on minimizing a cost function using dynamic programming (DP) The cost function incorporates similarity of echo amplitudes, displacement continuity We present, to the best of our knowledge, the first in-vivo patient studies of monitoring liver ablation with freehand DP elastography The thermal lesion was not discernable in the B-mode image but it was clearly visible in the strain image as well as in validation CT We also present 3D strain images from thermal lesions in ex-vivo ablation Good agreement was observed between strain images, CT, gross pathology