Abstract
In the past decade, there has been an increased interest in characterizing cardiac tissue mechanics utilizing newly developed ultrasound-based elastography techniques. These methods excite the tissue mechanically and track the response. Two frequently used methods, acoustic radiation force impulse and shear wave elasticity imaging (ARFI and SWEI), have been considered qualitative and quantitative techniques providing relative and absolute measures of tissue stiffness respectively. Depending on imaging conditions, it is desirable to identify indices of cardiac function that could be measured by ARFI and SWEI and to characterize the relationship between the measures. In this study, we have compared two indices (i.e. relaxation time constant used for diastolic dysfunction assessment and systolic/diastolic stiffness ratio) measured nearly simultaneously by M-mode ARFI and SWEI techniques. We additionally correlated ARFI-measured inverse displacements with SWEI measured values of the shear modulus of stiffness. For the eight animals studied, the average relaxation time constant (τ) measured by ARFI and SWEI were (69±18 ms, R2=0.96) and (65±19 ms, R2=0.99), (ARFI-SWEI inter-rater agreement = 0.90). Average systolic/diastolic stiffness ratio for ARFI, and SWEI measurements were 6.01±1.37 and 7.12±3.24 respectively (agreement=0.70). Shear modulus of stiffness (SWEI) was linearly related to inverse displacement values (ARFI) with a 95% CI for the slope of 0.010-0.011 (1/μm)/(kPa) (R2=0.73). In conclusion, the relaxation time constant and the systolic/diastolic stiffness ratio were calculated with good agreement between the ARFI and SWEI derived measurements. ARFI relative and SWEI absolute stiffness measurements were linearly related with varying slopes based on imaging conditions and subject tissue properties.
Authors
Maryam Vejdani-Jahromi, Matt Nagle, Yang Jiang, Gregg E Trahey, Patrick D Wolf
Year
2016
Journal
.
Keywords
Computational Finance and Computational Science