Reverberant Elastography for the Elastic Characterization of Anisotropic Tissues

TL;DR

This paper develops analytical solutions for reverberant elastography in anisotropic tissues, validated through simulations and experiments, enabling improved elastic characterization of biological tissues.

Contribution

It introduces closed-form solutions for reverberant elastography in anisotropic media, unifying isotropic and anisotropic cases and applicable to optical and ultrasound elastography.

Findings

Validated solutions with finite element simulations

Experimental characterization of chicken muscle tissue

Unified approach for isotropic and anisotropic media

Abstract

We derive closed-form solutions for reverberant elastography in anisotropic elastic media by adapting the framework used in electromagnetic theory to treat transverse isotropic materials. Different sample-setup geometries are analyzed, highlighting their relevance for both optical coherence elastography (OCE) and ultrasound elastography (USE). Numerical simulations using finite elements are used to validate the proposed solutions in practical cases. OCE experiments are conducted in ex vivo chicken muscle samples for the characterization of in-plane and out-of-plane shear modulus assuming a transverse isotropic elastic model. Additionally, we obtained a generalized geometry-independent solution for the isotropic media case, thus unifying previous results for reverberant elastography.