An ultrasound elastography method to determine the local stiffness of arteries with guided circumferential waves

详细信息    查看全文

• 作者：Guo-Yang Li^a ; ¹ ; Qiong He^b ; ¹ ; Guoqiang Xu^a ; Lin Jia^a ; Jianwen Luo^b ; Yanping Cao^a ; ^{caoyanping@tsinghua.edu.cn}
• 关键词：Shear wave elastography ; Arterial stiffness ; Guided circumferential wave ; Finite element analysis ; Inverse method
• 刊名：Journal of Biomechanics
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：25 January 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：51
• 期：Complete
• 页码：97-104
• 全文大小：3149 K
• 卷排序：51

文摘

Arterial stiffness is highly correlated with the functions of the artery and may serve as an important diagnostic criterion for some cardiovascular diseases. To date, it remains a challenge to quantitatively assess local arterial stiffness in a non-invasive manner. To address this challenge, we investigated the possibility of determining arterial stiffness using the guided circumferential wave (GCW) induced in the arterial wall by a focused acoustic radiation force. The theoretical model for the dispersion analysis of the GCW is presented, and a finite element model has been established to calculate the dispersion curve. Our results show that under described conditions, the dispersion relations of the GCW are basically independent of the curvature of the arterial wall and can be well-described using the Lamb wave (LW) model. Based on this conclusion, an inverse method is proposed to characterize the elastic modulus of artery. Both numerical experiments and phantom experiments had been performed to validate the proposed method. We show that our method can be applied to the cases in which the artery has local stenosis and/or the geometry of the artery cross-section is irregular; therefore, this method holds great potential for clinical use.