A high frame-rate and low-cost Elastography system by generating shear waves through continuous vibration of the ultrasound transducer

Abstract

Ultrasound shear wave elastography (SWE) utilizes the propagation of induced shear waves to characterize the shear modulus of soft tissue. Many methods rely on an acoustic radiation force (ARF) push beam to generate shear waves. However, specialized hardware is required to generate the push beams, and the thermal stress that is placed upon the ultrasound system, transducer, and tissue by the push beams currently limits the frame-rate to about 1 Hz. This paper presents Probe Oscillation Shear Elastography (PROSE) as an alternative method to measure tissue elasticity, by generating shear waves using a continuous mechanical vibration of an ultrasound transducer, while simultaneously detecting motion with the same transducer under pulse-echo mode. Motion of the transducer during detection produces a compression strain artifact that is coupled with the observed shear waves. A novel symmetric sampling scheme is proposed such that pulse-echo detection events are acquired when the ultrasound transducer returns to the same physical position, allowing the shear waves to be decoupled from the compression artifact. Full field-of-view (FOV) two-dimensional (2D) shear wave speed (SWS) images were obtained by applying a local frequency estimation (LFE) method, capable of generating a 2D map from a single frame of shear wave motion, allowing for an imaging frame rate comparable to the vibration frequency. PROSE was able to produce smooth and accurate shear wave images from three homogeneous phantoms with different moduli, with an effective frame rate of 300Hz. An inclusion phantom study showed that increased vibration frequencies improved the accuracy of inclusion imaging, and allowed targets as small as 6.5 mm to be resolved with good contrast (contrast-to-noise ratio ≥19 dB) between the target and background.