Two-dimensional shear-wave elastography on conventional ultrasound scanners with time-aligned sequential tracking (TAST) and comb-push ultrasound shear elastography (CUSE) - PubMed Skip to main page content
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. 2015 Feb;62(2):290-302.
doi: 10.1109/TUFFC.2014.006628.

Two-dimensional shear-wave elastography on conventional ultrasound scanners with time-aligned sequential tracking (TAST) and comb-push ultrasound shear elastography (CUSE)

Pengfei Song, Michael Macdonald, Russell Behler, Justin Lanning, Michael Wang, Matthew Urban, Armando Manduca, Heng Zhao, Matthew Callstrom, Azra Alizad, James Greenleaf, Shigao Chen

Two-dimensional shear-wave elastography on conventional ultrasound scanners with time-aligned sequential tracking (TAST) and comb-push ultrasound shear elastography (CUSE)

Pengfei Song et al. IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control. 2015 Feb.

Abstract

Two-dimensional shear-wave elastography presents 2-D quantitative shear elasticity maps of tissue, which are clinically useful for both focal lesion detection and diffuse disease diagnosis. Realization of 2-D shear-wave elastography on conventional ultrasound scanners, however, is challenging because of the low tracking pulse-repetition-frequency (PRF) of these systems. Although some clinical and research platforms support software beamforming and plane-wave imaging with high PRF, the majority of current clinical ultrasound systems do not have the software beamforming capability, which presents a critical challenge for translating the 2-D shear-wave elastography technique from laboratory to clinical scanners. To address this challenge, this paper presents a time-aligned sequential tracking (TAST) method for shear-wave tracking on conventional ultrasound scanners. TAST takes advantage of the parallel beamforming capability of conventional systems and realizes high-PRF shear-wave tracking by sequentially firing tracking vectors and aligning shear wave data in the temporal direction. The comb-push ultrasound shear elastography (CUSE) technique was used to simultaneously produce multiple shear wave sources within the field-of-view (FOV) to enhance shear wave SNR and facilitate robust reconstructions of 2-D elasticity maps. TAST and CUSE were realized on a conventional ultrasound scanner. A phantom study showed that the shear-wave speed measurements from the conventional ultrasound scanner were in good agreement with the values measured from other 2-D shear wave imaging technologies. An inclusion phantom study showed that the conventional ultrasound scanner had comparable performance to a state-of-the-art shear-wave imaging system in terms of bias and precision in measuring different sized inclusions. Finally, in vivo case analysis of a breast with a malignant mass, and a liver from a healthy subject demonstrated the feasibility of using the conventional ultrasound scanner for in vivo 2-D shear-wave elastography. These promising results indicate that the proposed technique can enable the implementation of 2-D shear-wave elastography on conventional ultrasound scanners and potentially facilitate wider clinical applications with shear-wave elastography.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Schematic plots of the sequential shear wave tracking sequence. (a) imaging FOV and the imaging vectors. Each imaging vector contains p imaging lines that can be parallel beamformed. The tracking sequence within a slice of the data at a certain depth is shown in (b), as indicated by the green dashed parallelogram with an arrow indicating the temporal direction (slow time). (b) the sequential tracking sequence of the N imaging vectors. The solid squares indicate the tracked shear wave data points. The hollow circles indicate the missed data points.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Schematic plot of the time alignment approach for tracking delay compensation.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Imaging setup for the validation study of TAST. The Philips L7-4 probe was used to produce an out-of-plane shear wave for the GE 9L-D probe to track.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Schematic plot of the relationship between detected shear wave signal (the bar-shaped rectangle with gradient) and TAST tracking sequence. The shear wave propagates from left to right. If the tracking direction is left-to-right, then the apparent shear wave speed will be biased high (indicated by θ′ which is smaller than θ); if the tracking direction is right-to-left, then the apparent shear wave speed will be biased low (indicated by θ″ which is greater than θ). Shear wave speed is given by cot(θ). The t′ and t″ lines indicate the apparent starting times of the shear wave signal detected by the sequential tracking scheme.
Figure 5
Figure 5
(a) – (d): Snapshots of the CUSE shear wave propagation movie at different time instants obtained from the 9L-D probe on the LE9. A 4-tooth focused comb-push was transmitted and the resulting shear waves were tracked by TAST. The numbers in (a) indicate the push beam location. (e): schematic plot of the comb-push beams and the imaging zones (given a desired PRFe of 4 kHz and 128 imaging lines).
Figure 6
Figure 6
(a) 2D shear wave speed map reconstructed from the shear waves in Fig. 5 on the 9L-D probe. (b) 2D shear wave speed map reconstructed from the same phantom on the C1-6-D probe. The green dashed circles indicate the ROIs selected for shear wave speed measurement.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Top row: 2D shear wave speed maps of the Type IV inclusions from the 9L-D probe of LE9. All maps are under the same color scale. The yellow dashed circles indicate the ROIs selected for shear wave speed measurements. Bottom row: 2D shear wave speed maps of the Type IV inclusions from the L10-2 probe of the Aixplorer. All maps are under the same color scale. The green solid circles indicate the ROIs selected for shear wave speed measurements.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Bar plots of the mean shear wave speed measurements of the two CIRS phantoms from the LE9 and the Aixplorer. The error bars indicate the standard deviation values from multiple independent data acquisitions at different depths.
Figure 9
Figure 9
2D shear wave speed maps of the breast lesion (panel (a) right and panel (b) top) and the normal breast tissue (panel (c) right and panel (d) top) obtained from the LE9 ((a) and (c)) and the Aixplorer ((b) and (d)). The corresponding B-mode images are also shown adjacent to the shear wave speed maps. The yellow dashed circle in (a) and (c) and the green solid circle in (b) and (d) indicate the ROIs selected for shear wave speed measurements.
Figure 10
Figure 10
2D shear wave speed maps of the liver from a healthy subject obtained by LE9 (a) and Aixplorer (b). The green dashed circle in (a) and the green solid circle in (b) indicate the ROI selected for shear wave speed measurements.
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