Multifrequency Liver Shear Wave Absolute Vibro-Elastography with an xMATRIX Array-2D vs. 3D Comparison Study

Shear wave absolute vibro-elastography (S-WAVE) is a quantitative technique that can provide volumetric hepatic stiffness measurements to aid the diagnosis and monitoring of chronic liver diseases. In our previous studies, we have shown that xMATRIX based 3D S-WAVE imaging system can generate large field of view shear wave phasors, and the volumetric reconstruction results are comparable to Magnetic Resonance Elastography (MRE). In recent literature, 2D vibro-elastography techniques are still the current state-of-the-art, and no study has compared inherent performance differences between the 2D and 3D approaches in a controlled setting. In this study, we address this gap in the literature. With an updated SWAVE imaging setup, a set of four liver tissue phantoms and five healthy subjects were imaged. 3D MRE was used as the reference method for a cross-comparison study. Our results show that the 2D reconstruction with S-WAVE phasor data showed a consistent overestimation pattern in both the phantom and in vivo dataset, resulting in a lower agreement to the MRE results when compared to the 3D reconstruction in a similar setting.