Abstract
Acoustic radiation force (ARF)-based shear wave elastography (SWE) is a clinically available ultrasound imaging mode that noninvasively and quantitatively measures tissue stiffness. Current implementations of ARF-SWE are largely limited to 2-D imaging, which does not provide a robust estimation of heterogeneous tissue mechanical properties. Existing 3-D ARF-SWE solutions that are clinically available are based on wobbler probes, which cannot provide true 3-D shear wave motion detection. Although 3-D ARF-SWE based on 2-D matrix arrays have been previously demonstrated, they do not provide a practical solution because of the need for a high channel-count ultrasound system (e.g., 1024-channel) to provide adequate volume rates and the delicate circuitries (e.g., multiplexers) that are vulnerable to the long-duration 'push' pulses. To address these issues, here we propose a new 3-D ARF-SWE method based on the 2-D row-column addressing (RCA) array which has a much lower element count (e.g., 256), provides an ultrafast imaging volume rate (e.g., 2000 Hz), and can withstand the push pulses. In this study, we combined the comb-push shear elastography (CUSE) technique with 2-D RCA for enhanced SWE imaging field-of-view (FOV). In vitro phantom studies demonstrated that the proposed method had robust 3-D SWE performance in both homogenous and inclusion phantoms. An in vivo study on a breast cancer patient showed that the proposed method could reconstruct 3-D elasticity maps of the breast lesion, which was validated using a commercial ultrasound scanner. These results demonstrate strong potential for the proposed method to provide a viable and practical solution for clinical 3-D ARF-SWE.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 448-458 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control |
Volume | 71 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Apr 1 2024 |
Keywords
- 3-D shear wave elastography (SWE)
- acoustic radiation force (ARF)
- comb-push shear elastography (CUSE)
- row-column addressing (RCA) array
- ultrafast ultrasound imaging
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Instrumentation
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
- Acoustics and Ultrasonics