Evaluation of tissue elasticity of ultrasonic correlation technique

Ultrasound has become a very popular diagnostic tool in clinics since it is noninvasive and safe to the patients. However, most of ultrasonic diagnostic equipment only provides the information of anatomic changes from B-mode images. To get so called earlier detection and earlier treatment, it is needful to find a more sensitive ultrasonic propagation property of tissues. Some researchers indicate that the elastic property of soft tissue may provide a good parameter candidate for tissue characterization. Therefore, it is very important to know how to measure the elastic property through ultrasonic techniques. In this paper, the correlation coefficient was employed to estimate the strain of test object by A-mode ultrasonic signals bouncing back from the region of interest before and other compression. The stress of test object was obtained from the analytic model and pressure sensor attached to the contact surface during compression. Finally, the elasticity images of two types of phantom composed of different polyester foams were used to demonstrate the validity of ultrasonic techniques.