Multi-plane estimation of the third- and fourth-order elastic constants of soft material

摘要

The nonlinear shear modulus was found to exhibit higher contrast than shear modulus for the detection of breast lesions (Bernal, Chamming's et al. 2016) and may thus serve as a potential diagnostic index of tissue pathology. Such nonlinear elastic constant of soft tissues has been demonstrated to be effectively estimated by combining ultrasound elastography and supersonic shear imaging based on acoustoelastic theory (Latorre-Ossa, Gennisson et al. 2012). Acoustoelastic theory relates shear wave propagation speed to the strain e and the angle θ between the principal loading direction and the imaging plane (Destrade, Gilchrist et al. 2010), suggesting that 2D distributions of the nonlinear parameters (the third- and fourth-order elastic constants (A, D)) in different planes (θ) could be estimated. We thus aimed to preliminarily validate this concept in vitro.