Shear Wave Speed Estimation Using Reverberant Shear Wave Fields: Implementation and Feasibility Studies

A paper co-authored by Professor Kevin Parker and PhD student Juvenal Ormachea titled "Shear wave speed estimation using reverberant shear wave fields: implementation and feasibility studies" will appear in the May 2018 issue of the Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology and can be found here. The paper is a collaboration Professor Benjamin Castaneda of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru (Lima, Peru). Recently, a new method was proposed for tissue stiffness estimation involving creation of a reverberant shear wave field propagating in all directions within the medium. These reverberant conditions lead to simple solutions, facile implementation, and rapid viscoelasticity estimation of local tissue. In this work, this new approach based on reverberant shear waves was evaluated and compared with another well-known elastography technique using two calibrated elastic and viscoelastic phantoms. Additionally, the clinical feasibility of this technique was analyzed by assessing shear wave speed in human liver and breast tissues, in vivo. The results indicate that it is possible to estimate the viscoelastic properties in each scanned medium.