Surface excitation of focused shear wave beams in soft elastic media: Experiment

Abstract

Shear waves are employed in medical imaging to reveal variations in the viscoelastic properties of soft tissues, which are useful biomarkers for pathologies such as breast lesions and liver disease. Shear wave excitation methods that employ acoustic radiation force or surface vibration with a small piston have limitations associated with imaging depth and shear wave amplitude. We introduce a new method for surface excitation of shear waves that employs longitudinal motion of a concave-shaped piston source to generate a focused shear wave beam, thereby increasing shear wave amplitude and penetration depth. Focused shear waves are excited in a gel phantom in the frequency range of 200 Hz to 400 Hz using a concave piston with 40 mm radius of curvature and 50 mm diameter. The wave field comprises both transverse and longitudinal displacement components, which are polarized perpendicular and parallel to the propagation direction, respectively. Transversely and longitudinally polarized wave fields are measured using ultrasound speckle tracking. The longitudinally polarized shear wave is of interest because it is measured in elastography applications. Preliminary comparisons exhibit good agreement between measured beam patterns and those predicted by an analytical theory for shear wave beam propagation due to surface excitation with a piston source.