Phase-Aberration Correction in Shear-wave Elastography Imaging Using Local Speed-of-Sound Adaptive Beamforming

TL;DR

This paper investigates how tissue inhomogeneities affect shear-wave speed estimation in elastography and demonstrates that local speed-of-sound adaptive beamforming significantly reduces bias compared to traditional methods.

Contribution

The study introduces a local speed-of-sound adaptive beamforming approach to correct aberrations in shear-wave elastography, improving accuracy over conventional constant SoS methods.

Findings

Traditional beamforming introduces substantial bias in SWS estimation due to SoS inhomogeneities.

Using local SoS maps reduces SWS estimation disparity by over 4 times.

Local SoS correction improves the accuracy of shear-wave elastography measurements.

Abstract

Shear-wave Elastography Imaging (SWEI) is a noninvasive imaging modality that provides tissue elasticity information by measuring the travelling speed of an induced shear-wave. It is commercially available on clinical ultrasound scanners and popularly used in the diagnosis and staging of liver disease and breast cancer. In conventional SWEI methods, a sequence of acoustic radiation force (ARF) pushes are used for inducing a shear-wave, which is tracked using high frame-rate multi-angle plane wave imaging (MA-PWI) to estimate the shear-wave speed (SWS). Conventionally, these plane waves are beamformed using a constant speed-of-sound (SoS), assuming an a-priori known and homogeneous tissue medium. However, soft tissues are inhomogeneous, with intrinsic SoS variations. In this work, study the SoS effects and inhomogeneities on SWS estimation, using simulation and phantoms experiments with porcine muscle as an abbarator, and show how these aberrations can be corrected using local speed-of-sound adaptive beamforming. For shear-wave tracking, we compare standard beamform with spatially constant SoS values to software beamforming with locally varying SoS maps. We show that, given SoS aberrations, traditional beamforming using a constant SoS, regardless of the utilized SoS value, introduces a substantial bias in resulting SWS estimations. Average SWS estimation disparity for the same material was observed over 4.3 times worse when a constant SoS value is used compared to that when a known SoS map is used for beamforming. Such biases are shown to be corrected by using a local SoS map in beamforming, indicating the importance of and a need for local SoS reconstruction techniques.