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Since its development over three decades ago, ultrasound elasticity imaging has been established for delineating tissue mechanical property as a relevant biomarker for numerous pathologies including those in liver, kidney, cardiovascular, and musculoskeletal diseases and cancer, among many other applications. While early implementations qualitatively assessed tissue stiffness by monitoring strain induced by external mechanical actuators, the field rapidly progressed to exploit acoustic radiation force and physiological motion as excitation sources, and mathematical relationships between the propagation of induced shear waves and underlying tissue viscoelasticity were derived to support quantitative evaluation of elastic and viscous moduli, albeit with constraints on the geometric complexity of the tissue medium. The field of ultrasound elasticity imaging is once again accelerating rapidly as advancements in transducer design and fabrication, high-performance computing, and artificial intelligence enable hand-held point-of-care systems and wearable sensors, manipulation and integration of data from more than a thousand simultaneous channels for highly-focused volumetric and multi-modal imaging, quantitative elastic and viscous modulus estimation in complex media, and extension to transcranial applications in brain. This presentation will include a review of these emerging technology development areas, and their impact on the future of ultrasound elasticity imaging will be posited in the context of clinical medicine.
Caterina M. Gallippi (Tue,) studied this question.