A Review of Shearwave Dispersion Ultrasound Vibrometry (SDUV) and its Applications

摘要

Measurement of tissue elasticity has emerged as an important advance in medical imaging and tissue charac-nterization. However, soft tissue is inherently a viscoelastic material. One way to characterize the viscoelastic material nproperties of a material is to measure shear wave propagation velocities within the material at different frequencies and nuse the dispersion of the velocities, or variation with frequency, to solve for the material properties. Shearwave Dispersion nUltrasound Vibrometry (SDUV) is an ultrasound-based technique that uses this feature to characterize the viscoelastic na-nture of soft tissue. This method has been used to measure the shear elasticity and viscosity in various types of soft tissues nincluding skeletal muscle, cardiac muscle, liver, kidney, prostate, and arterial vessels. This versatile technique provides nmeasurements of viscoelastic material properties with high spatial and temporal resolution, which can be used for assess-ning these properties in normal and pathologic tissues. The goals of this paper are to 1) give an overview of viscoelasticity nand shear wave velocity dispersion, 2) provide a history of the development of the SDUV method, and 3) survey applica-ntions for SDUV that have been previously reported.