Applications of acoustic radiation force for quantitative elasticity evaluation of bladder, thyroid, and breast

Abstract

Acoustic radiation force (ARF) provides a simple and yet non-invasive mechanism to induce a localized stress inside human body. The response to this excitation is used to estimate the mechanical properties of the targeted tissue in vivo. This talk covers an overview of three studies that use ARF for estimation of elastic properties of thyroid, breast, and the bladder in patients. The studies on thyroid and breast were aimed at differentiating between malignant and benign nodules. The study on the bladder was aimed at indirect evaluation of bladder compliance; hence, only a global measurement was needed. The study on breast showed that 16 out of 18 benign masses and 21 out of 25 malignant masses were correctly identified. The study on 9 thyroid patients with 7 benign and 2 malignant nodules showed all malignant nodules were correctly classified and only 2 of the 7 benign nodules were misclassified. The bladder compliance study revealed a high correlation between our method and independent clinical measurement of compliance (R-squared of 0.8–0.9). Further investigations on larger groups of patients are needed to fully evaluate the performances of the methods.