Tomoelastography by multifrequency wave number recovery

Abstract

In elastography mechanically excited shear waves are captured by medical ultrasound or MRI to reconstruct the elastic parameters of the underlying tissue. Current inversion algorithm use second-order derivatives for elasticity reconstruction which limits the spatial resolution of the elastic parameter maps. Here we propose a noise stable inversion method, which relies on wave number k reconstruction at different harmonic frequencies followed by their amplitude-weighted averaging prior to inversion. The algorithm is tested on abdominal and pelvic data. The resulting shear wave speed maps provide anatomical details in elastic parameter maps due to its inherent sensitivity to noise at pixel-wise resolution producing superior details to current MRE inversion methods.