Acousto-mechanical imaging for cancer detection

Abstract

One of the hot areas of ultrasonic medical diagnostics is elasticity imaging (EI). Recently, an alternative method of imaging tissue structures in terms of their elasticity, the method of mechanical imaging (MI), has emerged. The essence of MI is the solution to an inverse problem using the data of stress patterns on the surface of tissue compressed by a force sensor array [A. P. Sarvazyan, Proc. Tenth IEEE Symposium ‘‘Computer based medical systems,’’ Maribor, Slovenia, 120–125 (1997)]. A prototype of the device for mechanical imaging of the prostate has been developed and feasibility of MI technology has been proven in recent clinical studies. The present paper describes a modality of medical imaging, acousto-mechanical imaging (AMI) comprising features of both EI and MI. The data on the stress pattern measured by the force sensor array of MI complement the strain data obtained by ultrasonic EI device. An embodiment of the AMI device comprises a force-sensing array made of sound transparent film inserted between an ultrasonic scanner probe and the tissue. Synergy of combining these two complementary methods results in the fact that for certain applications the AMI technology has a diagnostic potential much superior to that of EI and MI separately.