Generative neural physics enables quantitative volumetric ultrasound of tissue mechanics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a neural physics-based framework for rapid, high-fidelity 3D imaging of tissue mechanics using ultrasound, enabling detailed biomechanical maps in under ten minutes, surpassing traditional methods.

Contribution

It presents a novel generative neural physics model combining PDE solvers with neural surrogates for efficient, accurate volumetric tissue mechanics imaging from limited data.

Findings

Achieved in vivo 3D tissue mechanics imaging in under ten minutes.

Provided detailed biomechanical maps of various tissues with MRI-like resolution.

Enhanced sensitivity to disease-related tissue mechanics compared to conventional ultrasound.

Abstract

Tissue mechanics--stiffness, density and impedance contrast--are broadly informative biomarkers across diseases, yet routine CT, MRI, and B-mode ultrasound rarely quantify them directly. While ultrasound tomography (UT) is intrinsically suited to in-vivo biomechanical assessment by capturing transmitted and reflected wavefields, efficient and accurate full-wave scattering models remain a bottleneck. Here, we introduce a generative neural physics framework that fuses generative models with physics-informed partial differential equation (PDE) solvers to produce rapid, high-fidelity 3D quantitative imaging of tissue mechanics. A compact neural surrogate for full-wave propagation is trained on limited cross-modality data, preserving physical accuracy while enabling efficient inversion. This enables, for the first time, accurate and efficient quantitative volumetric imaging of in vivo human breast and musculoskeletal tissues in under ten minutes, providing spatial maps of tissue mechanical properties not available from conventional reflection-mode or standard UT reconstructions. The resulting images reveal biomechanical features in bone, muscle, fat, and glandular tissues, maintaining structural resolution comparable to 3T MRI while providing substantially greater sensitivity to disease-related tissue mechanics.