Shear wave elastography on the GE LOGIQ E9 with Comb-push Ultrasound Shear Elastography (CUSE) and time aligned sequential tracking (TAST)

Two-dimensional (2D) shear wave elastography has emerged as a popular clinical and research tool for a variety of applications. Implementing 2D shear wave elastography on a conventional ultrasound scanner, however, is a challenging task due to the low imaging frame rate, which is essentially limited by the low parallel beamforming capability provided by the hardware beamformers on these scanners. This study developed a time aligned sequential tracking (TAST) technique that enables high pulse repetition frequency (PRF) shear wave tracking on conventional ultrasound scanners. The Comb-push Ultrasound Shear Elastography (CUSE) technique was combined with TAST to realize large field-of-view (FOV) 2D shear wave elastography. CUSE and TAST were implemented on the General Electric LOGIQ E9 (LE9) scanner. Phantom experiments showed that the LE9 could reconstruct large FOV, high quality 2D shear wave speed maps with accurate shear wave speed measurements that are in good agreement to other 2D shear wave imaging techniques. An inclusion phantom study showed that LE9 had comparable performance to the Aixplorer (Supersonic Imagine) in terms of bias and precision in measuring different sized inclusions. Finally, in vivo case studies of a breast with a malignant mass, and a liver from a healthy subject demonstrated the feasibility of using LE9 for in vivo 2D shear wave elastography.