Quantitative poroelastic property imaging combining shear wave and strain elastography

In poroelastography a region of soft tissue is compressed, and the fluid within its compartments escapes its boundaries causing a time- and spatially-varying deformation of its matrix that may be imaged as the ultrasound echo strain over time. Such strain movies allow the quantitative imaging of the product of the tissue´s aggregate modulus and permeability, H_Ak, and its Poisson´s ratio, v. Shear wave elastography provides movies of Young´s modulus, E. This study demonstrates in phantoms the potential of combining simultaneous dynamic shear wave and strain elastography to separate the components of H_Ak, and therefore recover k, independently of v and E. We refer to this new method as permelastography.