A numerical method to detect soft tissue injuries from tissue displacements

Abstract

A method is introduced to detect soft tissue injuries from internal measurements of displacements taken while a quasi-static load is applied to the tissue. We aimed to quantify and improve reliability of the diagnosis of soft tissue injuries with quasi-static ultrasound elastography. Our method consists of (i) building a model of displacements in healthy tissues and (ii) characterizing injured tissue for how displacements estimated in this tissue differed from the model. The model was built by applying principal component analysis to a data-set of displacements in healthy tissues. A Monte Carlo simulation of Finite Element models was performed to test our method. Our method could detect injuries quantitatively (area under ROC curves equal to with no displacement noise, with noise and with noise) and provided maps with significantly higher contrast-to-noise ratios between damaged and healthy regions than maps provided by current methods, either strain-based and modulus-based ().