Current Medical Imaging - Volume 7, Issue 4, 2011

From times immemorial, medical practitioners have used palpation for detection and characterization of pathologies. Recently, a new diagnostic imaging modality has emerged, called elasticity imaging (EI), which is an extension of the ancient art of palpation. Various imaging modalities may be used for EI, including ultrasound, MRI or even X-ray, to visualize the elasticity (stiffness) of soft tissue structures. Elasticity imaging is Read More

From times immemorial manual palpation served as a source of information on the state of soft tissues and allowed detection of various diseases accompanied by changes in tissue elasticity. During the last two decades, the ancient art of palpation gained new life due to numerous emerging elasticity imaging (EI) methods. Areas of applications of EI in medical diagnostics and treatment monitoring are steadily expanding. Elast Read More

The field of imaging the elastic properties of tissue has grown to an impressive variety of techniques and applications, some of which are currently in clinical trials. This review focuses on the specific role of vibration sonoelastography, beginning with the first images of tissue “hardness”, through the development of real time scanning techniques, 3D reconstructions, and applications to major disease categories, especially the dete Read More

The specific purpose of this review is to describe the progress of our work on elastography at the University of Texas Medical School-Houston in the past decade (2000-2010), and to relate it to our earlier work on this topic in the preceding decade (1991-2000). This review is neither intended to cover all specific aspects of this fast growing field, nor to be an exhaustive review of the literature. Such information is available separat Read More

We report a summary of recent developments and current status of our team's efforts to image and quantify in vivo nonlinear strain and tissue mechanical properties. Our work is guided by a focus on applications to cancer diagnosis and treatment using clinical ultrasound imaging and quasi-static tissue deformations. We review our recent developments in displacement estimation from ultrasound image sequences. We Read More

Acoustic radiation force based elasticity imaging methods are under investigation by many groups. These methods differ from traditional ultrasonic elasticity imaging methods in that they do not require compression of the transducer, and are thus expected to be less operator dependent. Methods have been developed that utilize impulsive (i.e. < 1 ms), harmonic (pulsed), and steady state radiation force excitations. The w Read More

Interactions between waves can be turned into profit to break diffraction limits and invent new kinds of medical images. It consists in productively combining two very different waves -- one to provide contrast, another to provide spatial resolution -in order to build a new kind of image, Multiwave imaging provides a unique image of the most interesting contrast with the most interesting resolution. We will show in this pa Read More

In recent years, several new techniques based on the radiation force of ultrasound have been developed. Vibroacoustography is a speckle-free ultrasound based imaging modality that can visualize normal and abnormal soft tissue through mapping the acoustic response of the object to a harmonic radiation force induced by ultrasound. In vibroacoustography, the ultrasound energy is converted from high ultrasound freque Read More