Abstract
The estimation of shear wave velocity is very important in ultrasonic shear wave elasticity imaging (SWEI). Since the stability and accuracy of ultrasonic testing equipment have been greatly improved, in order to further improve the accuracy of shear wave velocity estimation and increase the quality of shear wave elasticity maps, we propose a novel real-time curve tracing (RTCT) technique to accurately reconstruct the motion trace of shear wave fronts. Based on the curve fitting of each frame shear wave, the propagation velocity of two-dimensional shear waves can be estimated. In this paper, shear wave velocity estimation and shear wave image reconstruction are implemented for homogeneous regions and stiff spherical inclusion regions with different elasticity, respectively. The experimental result shows that the proposed shear wave velocity estimation method based on the real-time curve tracing method has advantages in accuracy and anti-noise performance. Moreover, by eliminating artifacts of shear wave videos, the velocity map acquired can restore the shape of inclusions better. The real-time curve tracing method can provide a new idea for the estimation of shear wave velocity and elastic parameters.
Highlights
The elastic information of biological tissue can provide valuable references for the diagnosis of tissue function and lesions [1,2,3,4,5]
With regard to the real-time curve tracing method, linear regression is performed on each group of transverse data, as shown in Figure 3, and the average value of the 61 groups is obtained as the shear wave velocity in the homogeneous region
With regard to the time-to-peak method and the lateral peak method, the shear wave velocity is calculated by the peak information of the shear wave
Summary
The elastic information of biological tissue can provide valuable references for the diagnosis of tissue function and lesions [1,2,3,4,5]. Ultrasonic shear wave elastography has developed rapidly because it can calculate the elastic distribution of soft tissue according to the propagation velocity of shear waves. This technology includes transient elastography (TE) [12], acoustic radiation force impulse imaging (ARFI imaging) [13,14], comb-push ultrasound shear elastography (CUSE) [15,16], supersonic shear imaging (SSI) [17,18], etc. Supersonic shear imaging is one of the most advanced shear wave elastic imaging methods, and it shows great advantages in noninvasive evaluations of liver and breast [19,20,21].
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