Development of a Novel Ultrasound Elastography System for Imaging Breast Cancer

Shadi Shavakh

Date of Award

2011

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Engineering Science

Program

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Supervisor

Dr. Abbas Samani

Second Advisor

Dr. Aaron Fenster

Abstract

This study involves development of a real-time ultrasound based elastography system for breast cancer assessment. This system is capable of imaging the absolute Young’s moduli of breast tissues. The reconstruction involves mechanical stimulation, displacement and force data acquisition followed by Young’s modulus reconstruction using a constrained data inversion algorithm. This algorithm is iterative where each iteration involves stress calculation followed by Young’s modulus updating. By incorporating force data in the inversion, it was possible to reconstruct the absolute Young’s moduli. To speed up the reconstruction process, statistical FEM technique (SFEM) was utilized for stress calculation.

To validate the proposed system, in silico and tissue mimicking phantom studies were conducted for unifocal and multifocal breast cancer cases. Furthermore, to assess suitability of the system for clinical applications, we investigated the impact of the ultrasound imaging field of view and geometry approximation on the reconstruction. Results obtained from these studies showed great promise, paving the way for further validation and application in real-time clinical applications. Results obtained from the in silico phantom study show accurate reconstruction of the YM with average error of less than 6%, and the tissue mimicking phantom study indicates average errors less than 12.8%.

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