Investigation of new methods for quantitative elastography

• Grant number: 14/24790-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: March 01, 2015
• End date: February 28, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Biomedical Engineering - Medical Engineering
• Agreement: Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES)
• Principal Investigator: Sergio Shiguemi Furuie
• Grantee: Fernando Mitsuyama Cardoso
• Host Institution: Escola Politécnica (EP). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Elastography is a technique that may utilize ultrasound or magnetic resonance to provide information about the mechanic properties of the tissue of interest. This information may be important in lesion characterization and, consequently, may help the physician in the process of diagnosis. During the last decades, ultrasound elastography has been developed rapidly by several research groups and its application in medical practice is already a reality. Methods that provide quantitative information about the tissue, such as shear wave, have been well accepted in the medical-scientific community. Quantitative information is important because it establishes an absolute reference to the mechanical properties of the tissue been evaluated. However, these techniques present some limitation related to the equipment, which require special end expensive hardware. Another limitation is the limited reach (depth) of the current commercially available elastography equipment, 10 cm. In this project, we propose a technique that is able to provide quantitative information using strain elastography, which is the elastography method most widely used. Through the inclusion of an elastic layer, with known mechanical properties, between the transducer and the imaged tissue, the qualitative information may be normalized with the information of the elastic layer, and the quantitative information about the tissue could be may be estimated. Besides that, we propose a to perform shear wave elastography in deep tissues using two transducers: one with low frequency to displace the tissue and another with high frequency to monitor the shear wave speed. (AU)

Scientific publications

(References retrieved automatically from Web of Science and SciELO through information on FAPESP grants and their corresponding numbers as mentioned in the publications by the authors)

CARDOSO, FERNANDO MITSUYAMA; FURUIE, SERGIO SHIGUEMI; DURIC, N; HEYDE, B. An improved implementation of block matching for motion estimation in ultrasound imaging. MEDICAL IMAGING 2017: ULTRASONIC IMAGING AND TOMOGRAPHY, v. 10139, p. 13-pg., 2017-01-01. (14/24790-3)