A Shear Modulus Imager

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): WinProbe Corporation proposes research into implementing real-time elastography methods of ultrasonic imaging aimed at improving the diagnosis of breast cancer in an optimized Research Platform. Elastography has been the subject of intense research for at least twenty years yet only minimal commercial offerings have materialized. The practical issue of providing enough computational power intimately connected to the RF-data stream of the transducer, to produce the required complex real time calculations, has been challenging and not yet fully attained. WinProbe is proposing the introduction of a very powerful computational ultrasound system to this field and to convert the work of several eminent researchers of elastography to a practical imaging mode. Several of these researchers have also been enlisted in this project's team. It is thus proposed to advance the knowledge base through to a practical clinical method and instrument. Significant prior research exists that reports success in discriminating cancerous lesions from normal tissue by these methods in retrospective computations. One primary objective of this project is to investigate the use of Acoustic Radiation Force Pushes and their subsequently generated shear waves, in combination with real-time static elastography produced by manually applied pre-compression loads. The modulus and the rate of change of modulus with respect to strain will be quantitatively estimated, and the results mapped in real-time in color overlays of a live real-time B-Scan image. Demonstration of the methods instantiated into the hardware is presented as the milestones for Phase I. Testing, evaluation, optimizing and in vivo studies are proposed for Phase II. The following are tasks to be performed in Phase I:  Transducer stress measurement by incorporation of load cells into a transducer and the associated software program for operator feedback and automatic triggers for data acquisition,  Algorithm instantiation for real-time static elastography,  Algorithm instantiation for Acoustic Radiation Force Push with modeling and verification,  Algorithm instantiation for estimation of shear displacement at the focal point of the ARF-Push,  Algorithm investigation for modulus estimation by tracking shear wave propagation,  Design and construction of phantoms mimicking differing moduli of cancer lesions and normal tissue for the evaluation of the algorithms above.