Abstract

The specific purpose of this review is to describe the progress of our work on elastography at the University of Texas Medical School-Houston in the past decade (2000-2010), and to relate it to our earlier work on this topic in the preceding decade (1991-2000). This review is neither intended to cover all specific aspects of this fast growing field, nor to be an exhaustive review of the literature. Such information is available separately and in several literary reviews.

The early work in our Laboratory was started [1] with the fundamental theoretical and experimental development of elastography and ended with demonstration of the feasibility of producing elastograms in a clinical setting [2]. During the following decade our work has branched out into three main directions. These were (1) a continued effort to demonstrate the ability of elastography to depict the elastic properties of tissues and to develop improved algorithms for attaining quality strain estimations; (2) the development and practical in vivo demonstration of Poisson's ratio elastography (poroelastography) for the study of poroelastic materials such as lymphedematous tissues; and (3) the development of axial-shear strain elastography (ASSE) for imaging the mechanical boundary conditions at tissue interfaces, and to demonstrate the utility of this modality in the differentiation between benign and malignant breast lesions in vivo. These three areas are the main topics that are covered in this review.

Keywords: Elastography, strain imaging, elasticity, poroelastography, axial shear strain elastography, elastograms, Poisson's ratio, fibroadenoma, breast cancer, Young's modulus, strain estimator, BIRADS, NASSA