Numerical Modeling and Experimental Investigation of Biomedical Elastographic Problem by Using Plane Strain State Model

Abstract

Ultrasonic elastographic imaging technique has been developed during last 10 years as a powerful method to image the elastic properties of soft biological tissues. The method consists of applying a small external, quasi-static compressions to the region of interest and use the set of radio frequency A-scans recorded before and after compression to estimate corresponding matrix of axial displacements by means of correlation technique. Afterwards, the displacement matrix is used to estimate the strain field, which can be interpreted as a relative measure of elasticity distribution and can be visualized as a gray scale elastogram. The main intention of our research was to consider the problem of visualization and reconstruction of tissue elastic properties within the framework of an appropriate inverse problem solution as well as its experimental exploration.