LAUSR

Shear wave elastography (SWE) is clinically used for the measurement of soft tissue mechanical properties. Most SWE methods assume that the tissue is elastic, but soft tissues are inherently viscoelastic. The viscoelasticity can be characterized by examining phase velocity dispersion. Methods to extract the phase velocities from the spatiotemporal data, v(x,t), involve using a two-dimensional Fourier transform. The Fourier representation, V(k,f), is searched for peaks that correspond to the phase velocities. We present a method that uses the Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) method to provide robust estimation of the phase velocity dispersion curves. We compared results from the MUSIC method with the current approach of searching for peaks in the V(k,f) representation. We tested this method on digital phantom data created using finite element models (FEMs) in viscoelastic media excited by a simulated acoustic radiation force push from a curved linear array. We evaluated the algorithm with different l...