Abstract
Abstract Introduction Magneto-motive ultrasound (MMUS) combines magnetism and ultrasound (US) to detect magnetic nanoparticles in soft tissues. One type of MMUS called shear-wave dispersion magneto-motive ultrasound (SDMMUS) analyzes magnetically induced shear waves (SW) to quantify the elasticity and viscosity of the medium. The lack of an established presets or protocols for pre-clinical and clinical studies currently limits the use of MMUS techniques in the clinical setting. Methods This paper proposes a platform to acquire, process, and analyze MMUS and SDMMUS data integrated with a clinical ultrasound equipment. For this purpose, we developed an easy-to-use graphical user interface, written in C++/Qt4, to create an MMUS pulse sequence and collect the ultrasonic data. We designed a graphic interface written in MATLAB to process, display, and analyze the MMUS images. To exemplify how useful the platform is, we conducted two experiments, namely (i) MMUS imaging to detect magnetic particles in the stomach of a rat, and (ii) SDMMUS to estimate the viscoelasticity of a tissue-mimicking phantom containing a spherical target of ferrite. Results The developed software proved to be an easy-to-use platform to automate the acquisition of MMUS/SDMMUS data and image processing. In an in vivo experiment, the MMUS technique detected an area of 6.32 ± 1.32 mm2 where magnetic particles were heterogeneously distributed in the stomach of the rat. The SDMMUS method gave elasticity and viscosity values of 5.05 ± 0.18 kPa and 2.01 ± 0.09 Pa.s, respectively, for a tissue-mimicking phantom. Conclusion Implementation of an MMUS platform with addressed presets and protocols provides a step toward the clinical implementation of MMUS imaging equipment. This platform may help to localize magnetic particles and quantify the elasticity and viscosity of soft tissues, paving a way for its use in pre-clinical and clinical studies.
Highlights
Magneto-motive ultrasound (MMUS) combines magnetism and ultrasound (US) to detect magnetic nanoparticles in soft tissues
A continuous-time harmonic magnetic field with frequency in order of few Hertz, or a burst of magnetic field pulses, usually excites the magnetic nanoparticles (Mehrmohammadi et al, 2011c). Using this technique researchers have investigated MMUS to evaluate the viscoelasticity of soft tissues by tracking the shear waves induced by motion of the magnetic nanoparticles (Almeida et al, 2014; 2015; Pavan et al, 2012), a method known as shear-wave dispersion magneto‐motive ultrasound
We varied the threshold percentage between 5% and 95% of the maximum relative energy to measure the region of interest (ROI) area, the area calculated by using an ellipsoid approximation (Figure 4c)
Summary
Magneto-motive ultrasound (MMUS) combines magnetism and ultrasound (US) to detect magnetic nanoparticles in soft tissues. Conclusion: Implementation of an MMUS platform with addressed presets and protocols provides a step toward the clinical implementation of MMUS imaging equipment This platform may help to localize magnetic particles and quantify the elasticity and viscosity of soft tissues, paving a way for its use in pre-clinical and clinical studies. A continuous-time harmonic magnetic field with frequency in order of few Hertz, or a burst of magnetic field pulses, usually excites the magnetic nanoparticles (Mehrmohammadi et al, 2011c) Using this technique researchers have investigated MMUS to evaluate the viscoelasticity of soft tissues by tracking the shear waves induced by motion of the magnetic nanoparticles (Almeida et al, 2014; 2015; Pavan et al, 2012), a method known as shear-wave dispersion magneto‐motive ultrasound (SDMMUS) (Almeida et al, 2014). The velocity and attenuation of the shear waves can be analyzed to obtain the elasticity and viscosity of the medium (Zhao et al, 2010)
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