Two-dimensional complex shear modulus imaging of soft tissues by integration of Algebraic Helmoltz Inversion and LMS filter into dealing with noisy data: a simulation study.

Abstract

Elasticity and viscosity of soft tissues can be obtained from the complex shear modulus imaging (CSMI). CSMI is often used not only to investigate the structure of tissues but also to detect tumors in tissues. One of the most popular ways to categorize the methods used in CSMI is into quasi-static and dynamic methods. In the dynamic method, a force excitation is used to create the shear wave propagation, and the particle velocities are measured to extract their amplitude and phase at spatial locations. These parameters are then employed to directly or indirectly estimate the Complex Shear Modulus (CSM) represented by elasticity and viscosity. Algebraic Helmholtz Inversion (AHI) algorithm provides the direct estimation of CSM using the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) technique. The limitation of this method, however, is that the noise generated from measuring the particle velocity strongly degrades the accuracy of the estimation. To overcome this problem, we proposed in this paper an adaptive AHI (AAHI) algorithm that offers a good performance in CSMI with a mean error of 2.06%.