• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.29 no.1E
• /
• pp.1-10
• /
• 2010

The difference in echogenicity between cancerous and normal tissues is not quite distinguishable in ultrasound B-mode imaging. However, tumor or cancer in breast or prostate tends to be stiffer than the surrounding normal tissue. Thus, imaging the stiffness contrast between the two different tissue types is helpful for quantitative diagnosis, and such a method of imaging the elasticity of human tissue is collectively referred to as ultrasound elasticity imaging. Recently, elasticity imaging has established itself as an effective diagnostic modality in addition to ultrasound B-mode imaging. The purpose of this paper is to present various elasticity imaging methods that have been reported up to now and to describe their principles of operation and characteristics.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.32 no.5
• /
• pp.573-584
• /
• 2012

Breast and prostate tumors or cancers tend to be stiffer than the surrounding normal tissue. However, the difference in echogenicity between cancerous and normal tissues is not clearly distinguishable in ultrasound B-mode imaging. Thus, imaging the stiffness contrast between the two different tissue types helps to diagnose lesions quantitatively, and such a method of imaging the elasticity of human tissue is termed ultrasound elasticity imaging. Recently, elasticity imaging has become an effective complementary diagnostic modality along with ultrasound B-mode imaging. This paper presents various elasticity imaging methods that have been reported up to now and describes their characteristics and principles of operation.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
• /
• v.27 no.3
• /
• pp.117-124
• /
• 2006

Recently, active research has been going on to measure the elastic modulus of human soft tissue with medical ultrasound imaging systems for the purpose of diagnosing cancers or tumors which have been difficult to detect with conventional B-mode imaging techniques. In this paper, a real-time ultrasonic elasticity imaging system is implemented in software on a Pentium processor-based ultrasonic diagnostic imaging system. Soft tissue is subjected to external vibration, and the resulting tissue displacements change the phase of received echoes, which is in turn used to estimate tissue elasticity. It was confirmed from experiment with a phantom that the implemented elasticity imaging system could differentiate between soft and hard regions, where the latter is twice harder than the former, while operating at an adequate frame rate of 20 frames/s.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.29 no.3E
• /
• pp.107-110
• /
• 2010

In this paper, the rationale and contents of the special issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea regarding comprehensive reviews on past, present and future of biomedical ultrasound are described. Brief descriptions of invited articles are given, and efforts by all contributing authors are gratefully acknowledged.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.31 no.3
• /
• pp.151-160
• /
• 2012

In medical ultrasound imaging, elasticity imaging helps to diagnose tumors such as cancer. This paper is concerned with the application of acoustic radiation force to soft tissue of interest to implement elasticity imaging. In order to reduce the data acquisition time, instead of relying on transmit focusing, a plane wave of burst type is transmitted to apply the acoustic radiation force simultaneously to an entire imaging region to be observed. A homogeneous phantom experiment confirms that increasing the transmit excitation duration instead of employing transmit focusing generates a high enough acoustic radiation force to obtain elasticity images. It is found, however, that a different displacement versus time characteristic is observed unlike the case of using a conventional focused acoustic radiation force. Experimental results obtained through the use of an ultrasound phantom and a bovine liver show that lesions can be correctly differentiated.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.42 no.5
• /
• pp.403-411
• /
• 2023

Functional ultrasound imaging, such as elasticity imaging and micro-blood flow Doppler imaging, enhances diagnostic capability by providing useful mechanical and functional information about tissues. However, the implementation of functional ultrasound imaging poses limitations such as the storage of vast amounts of data in Radio Frequency (RF) data acquisition and processing. In this paper, we propose a sub-Nyquist approach that reduces the amount of acquired axial samples for efficient shear-wave elasticity imaging. The proposed method acquires data at a sampling rate one-third lower than the conventional Nyquist sampling rate and tracks shear-wave signals through RF signals reconstructed using band-pass filtering-based interpolation. In this approach, the RF signal is assumed to have a fractional bandwidth of 67 %. To validate the approach, we reconstruct the shear-wave velocity images using shear-wave tracking data obtained by conventional and proposed approaches, and compare the group velocity, contrast-to-noise ratio, and structural similarity index measurement. We qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the potential of sub-Nyquist sampling-based shear-wave elasticity imaging, indicating that our approach could be practically useful in three-dimensional shear-wave elasticity imaging, where a massive amount of ultrasound data is required.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.29 no.4
• /
• pp.368-373
• /
• 2009

A human tissue mimicking phantom is constructed to assess the performance of a medical ultrasound elasticity imaging system. In a human body, the tumor or cancer is stiffer than its surrounding normal tissue. A technique fur imaging the elasticity of such a tissue is referred to as elastography. Homogeneous elasticity phantoms with differing Young's moduli are constructed using a plastic hardener and softener to simulate the mechanical characteristics of a diseased human tissue. The Young's modulus of the fabricated homogeneous phantom materials were measured from 11.1 to 79.6 kPa depending on the mixing ratio of the amount of the hardener to that of the softener. An ultrasound lesion mimicking phantom was made of these materials, and ultrasound elasticity imaging was performed on it. It is confirmed in this paper that the fabricated plastic-based elasticity phantom is useful in representing the elastic characteristics of a human tissue.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.29 no.8
• /
• pp.504-508
• /
• 2010

In conventional diagnostic ultrasound strain imaging, when displaying strain image on a monitor, human visual characteristics are utilized such that hard regions are displayed as dark and soft regions are displayed as bright. Thus, hard regions representing tumor or cancer are displayed as dark, decreasing the contrast inside the lesion. Because the lesion area is stiff and thus displayed as dark, a method of inverting the image brightness and thereby increasing the contrast in the lesion for better diagnostic purposes is proposed wherein a postcompression signal is extended in the time domain by a factor corresponding to the reciprocal of the amount of the applied compression using a technique termed globally uniform stretching. Experiments were carried out to verify the proposed method on an ultrasound elasticity phantom with radio-frequency data acquired from a diagnostic ultrasound clinical scanner. It is found that the new method improves the contrast-to-noise ratio by a factor of up to about 1.8 compared to a conventional strain imaging method that employs a reversed gray color map without globally uniform stretching.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
• /
• v.15 no.6
• /
• pp.883-889
• /
• 2021

This study was conducted on 101 patients who visited hospital for abdominal ultrasonography from May 2020 to December 2020. The purpose of this study was to find out the elasticity according to the ultrasound images (echo pattern, splenomegaly, hepatitis) during the ultrasound examination using the shear wave elastography. The shear wave elastography value of the normal group of the echo pattern was 5.75±1.58 kPa, and the group with the abnormal echo pattern was 8.84±4.94 kPa, and the shear wave elastography value of the abnormal group was high (p<0.05). In normal spleen size, hepatic elasticity value was 6.33±2.54 kPa, and hepatic elasticity value of splenomegaly was 13.73±5.48 kPa. In the case of splenomegaly, the liver elasticity value was high, and there was a statistically significant difference (p<0.05). As the spleen size increased, the liver elasticity value increased by 1.485 times, and as hepatitis progressed, the liver elasticity value increased by 1.573 times (p<0.05). As a result of analysis of concordance between ultrasound imaging findings and shear wave elastography, the Kappa value was found to be as high as 0.922 (p<0.05), which showed high concordance between the two test methods. Additional comparisons of liver elasticity values in shearwave elastography tests along with liver ultrasound findings are thought to be of great help in diagnosing liver fibrosis.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
• /
• v.32 no.5
• /
• pp.484-493
• /
• 2012

Since the 1980s, there have been many research activities devoted to quantitatively characterizing and imaging human tissues based on sound speed, attenuation coefficient, density, nonlinear B/A parameter, etc., but those efforts have not yet reached the stage of commercialization. However, a new imaging technology termed elastography, which was proposed in the early 1980s, has recently been implemented in commercial clinical ultrasound scanners, and is now being used to diagnose prostates, breasts, thyroids, livers, blood vessels, etc., more quantitatively as a complementary adjunct modality to the conventional B-mode imaging. The purpose of this article is to introduce and review various elastographic algorithms for use in quasistatic or static compression type elasticity imaging modes. Most of the algorithms are based on the crosscorrelation or autocorrelation function methods, and the fundamental difference is that the time shift is estimated by changing the lag variable in the former, while it is directly obtained from the phase shift at a fixed lag in the latter.