Fast single tracking location shear wave elasticity imaging

Single tracking location shear wave elasticity imaging (STL-SWEI) has been proven to have the capability to eliminate the speckle bias due to its unique push-tracking mode. However, compared to multiple tracking location shear wave elasticity imaging (MTL-SWEI), STL-SWEI requires more acoustic excitation and push-track sequences, and thus has a lower frame rate. In this work, a new approach named fast single tracking location shear wave elasticity imaging (FSTL-SWEI) is presented. FSTL utilizes spatially modulated ultrasound radiation force (SMURF) applying a special acoustic intensity pattern to generate lateral sinusoidal distributed (LSD) shear waves. It infers shear wave speed (SWS) distribution using the instantaneous phase of the shear wave motion signals obtained by the Hilbert-Huang Transform. Able to map the elasticity of the region of interest (ROI) in only one push-track sequence, it can achieve a frame rate comparative to MTL-SWEI. To validate the performance of this method, a finite element model (FEM) was established to simulate breast tissue with an inclusion. The simulation results show that FSTL can well distinguish the inclusion from the background.