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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Acoust.
Sec. Ultrasound Technologies
Volume 2 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/facou.2024.1485055
This article is part of the Research Topic Insights in Ultrasound Technologies: 2024 View all articles

A pilot study of cardiac guided wave elastography: An ex vivo testing in a rodent model with mechanical testing validation

Provisionally accepted
Jingfei Liu Jingfei Liu 1,2*Daniella Corporan Daniella Corporan 2,3Don Vanderlaan Don Vanderlaan 2Muralidhar Padala Muralidhar Padala 2,3Stanislav Emelianov Stanislav Emelianov 2,3
  • 1 Texas Tech University, Lubbock, United States
  • 2 Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
  • 3 School of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Many heart diseases can change the elasticity of myocardial tissues, making elastography a potential medical imaging strategy for heart disease diagnosis and cardiovascular risk assessment. Among the existing elastography methods, ultrasound elastography is an appealing choice because of ultrasound's inherent advantages of low cost, high safety, wide availability, and deep penetration. The existing investigations of cardiac ultrasound elastography were implemented based on a bulk model of heart tissue, treating the waves generated in the myocardial tissues as shear waves. In this pilot study, we considered the distinct geometric characteristics of heart tissue, i.e., being a layered structure and its dispersive nature as biological tissue. Based on these considerations, we modeled heart tissues as a layered-dispersive structure and developed a new ultrasound elastography method, ultrasonic guided wave elastography, to characterize the myocardial elasticity. The validity of this layered-dispersive model and the reliability of the developed guided wave elastography were first verified on tissuemimicking phantoms. Then, the guided wave elastography was applied to an ex vivo imaging of a rat heart tissue specimen in real-time during the biaxial planar mechanical testing. The comparison of the real-time myocardial elasticity obtained from guided wave elastography and mechanical testing demonstrated strong matching, verifying the reliability of the developed cardiac guided wave elastography as a potential method for characterizing myocardial elasticity.

    Keywords: Heart tissue, guided wave elastography, mechanical testing, Group velocity, Phase velocity, myocardial elasticity

    Received: 23 Aug 2024; Accepted: 24 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Liu, Corporan, Vanderlaan, Padala and Emelianov. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Jingfei Liu, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.