PMID- 30222126
OWN - NLM
STAT- MEDLINE
DCOM- 20190814
LR  - 20190814
IS  - 1361-6560 (Electronic)
IS  - 0031-9155 (Linking)
VI  - 63
IP  - 20
DP  - 2018 Oct 9
TI  - Diverging beam with synthetic aperture technique for rotation elastography: 
      preliminary experimental results.
PG  - 20LT01
LID - 10.1088/1361-6560/aae1c6 [doi]
AB  - Rotation Elastogram (RE) is a 2D spatial distribution map of the estimated local 
      rigid-body rotation undergone by a target when subjected to an external 
      compression, which is one of the recent variants in elastographic imaging. A 
      recent study has shown that inclusion-contrast in RE is independent of 
      inclusion-background modulus contrast and thus may be helpful in distinguishing 
      between barely-stiff benign and malignant lesions. However, estimation of quality 
      RE requires not only precise axial displacement estimates but also lateral 
      displacement estimates. The widely used conventional focused beamforming 
      technique using linear array (CFB-LA) provides better lateral resolution only 
      over the depth of focus, which still results in poorer quality lateral 
      displacement estimates compared to the axial displacement estimates. As an 
      alternative to overcome this depth-dependent lateral resolution and obtain an 
      improved lateral resolution, synthetic aperture-based approaches have been 
      proposed in literature. Recently, we developed a synthetic aperture-based method, 
      diverging beam with synthetic aperture technique (DB-SAT) that was aimed to not 
      only reduce the ultrasound system complexity, but also provide improved lateral 
      resolution throughout the depth of imaging and at higher frame-rate than that is 
      possible in CFB-LA. In this paper, we report the preliminary experimental 
      findings on the use of DB-SAT on RE and compare the resultant image quality 
      against that obtained using often-employed CFB-LA and the synthetic transmit 
      aperture (STA) technique. The investigation was done on tissue-mimicking phantoms 
      and using contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) as the metric for performance evaluation. 
      The estimated CNR values from the REs obtained using CFB-LA, STA, and DB-SAT were 
      2.69  +/-  0.81, 1.35  +/-  0.22, and 14.71  +/-  9.83, respectively, for inclusion 
      present at 55 mm depth. The obtained results clearly demonstrated that the 
      quality of RE can be improved significantly, especially at larger depth, using 
      DB-SAT compared to that obtained using CFB-LA and STA technique.
FAU - Lokesh, B
AU  - Lokesh B
AD  - Biomedical Ultrasound Laboratory, Biomedical Engineering Group, Department of 
      Applied Mechanics, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India.
FAU - Thittai, Arun K
AU  - Thittai AK
LA  - eng
PT  - Letter
PT  - Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
DEP - 20181009
PL  - England
TA  - Phys Med Biol
JT  - Physics in medicine and biology
JID - 0401220
MH  - Elasticity Imaging Techniques/*instrumentation
MH  - Phantoms, Imaging
MH  - *Rotation
MH  - Ultrasonography
EDAT- 2018/09/18 06:00
MHDA- 2019/08/15 06:00
CRDT- 2018/09/18 06:00
PHST- 2018/09/18 06:00 [pubmed]
PHST- 2019/08/15 06:00 [medline]
PHST- 2018/09/18 06:00 [entrez]
AID - 10.1088/1361-6560/aae1c6 [doi]
PST - epublish
SO  - Phys Med Biol. 2018 Oct 9;63(20):20LT01. doi: 10.1088/1361-6560/aae1c6.