SHEAR WAVE GROUP VELOCITY ESTIMATION USING SPATIOTEMPORAL PEAKS AND AMPLITUDE THRESHOLDING

摘要

Described here are systems and methods for estimating shear wave velocity from data acquired with a shear wave elastography system. More particularly, the systems and methods described here implement a spatiotemporal time-to-peak algorithm that searches for the times at which shear wave motion is at a maximum while also searching for the lateral locations at which shear wave motion is at a maximum. Motion can include displacement, velocity, or acceleration caused by propagating shear waves. A fitting procedure (e.g., a linear fit) is performed on a combined set of these temporal peaks and spatial peaks to estimate the shear wave velocity, from which mechanical properties can be computed. Motion amplitude thresholding can also be used to increase the number of points for the fitting.