Modality independent elastography (MIE): a new approach to elasticity imaging

The correlation between tissue stiffness and health is an accepted form of organ disease assessment. As a result, there has been a significant amount of interest in developing methods to image elasticity parameters (i.e., elastography). The modality independent elastography (MIE) method combines a nonlinear optimization framework, computer models of soft-tissue deformation, and standard measures of image similarity to reconstruct elastic property distributions within soft tissue. In this paper, simulation results demonstrate successful elasticity image reconstructions in breast cross-sectional images acquired from magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. Results from phantom experiments illustrate its modality independence by reconstructing elasticity images of the same phantom in both MR and computed tomographic imaging units. Additional results regarding the performance of a new multigrid strategy to MIE and the implementation of a parallel architecture are also presented.