Shear wave attenuation quantification in viscoelastic transverse isotropic soft tissue using shear wave elastography

摘要

Evaluation of rheological behavior of soft tissues provides an important diagnosis tool. Nowadays, most of the available commercial ultrasound systems assume tissues as isotropic and purely elastic. Recently in order to fully characterize the rheological behavior of tissues, methods to estimate both shear wave speed (V) and attenuation (α) were developed for isotropic media [1, 2]. In acoustic radiation force elastography, generated shear waves are not plane and a diffraction correction is needed to estimate α [1]. Here a diffraction correction is studied through numerical simulation and experimentally to measure α for an homogeneous transverse isotropic, viscoelastic (TIV) medium.