Quantitative Poroelastic Property Imaging Combining Shear Wave and Strain Elastography

In poroelastography a region of soft tissue is compressed, and the fluid within its compartments escapes its boundaries causing a time- and spatially-varying deformation of its matrix that may be imaged as the ultrasound echo strain over time. Such strain movies allow the quantitative imaging of the product of the tissue's aggregate modulus and permeability, H A k, and its Poisson's ratio, v. Shear wave elastography provides movies of Young's modulus, E. This study demonstrates in phantoms the potential of combining simultaneous dynamic shear wave and strain elastography to separate the components of H A k, and therefore recover k, independently of v and E. We refer to this new method as permelastography.