Effects of aberration in crawling wave sonoelastography

Quantitative sonoelastography, through the formation of crawling waves, allows the estimation of elastic parameters in tissues using pulsed wave Doppler techniques. However, this technique´s performance may be compromised by aberration effects during in vivo applications. In this study, an experimental evaluation of the effects of aberration when estimating shear wave speed from homogeneous phantoms was performed. The evaluations were performed using a commercial ultrasound scanner and gelatin-agar aberration layers of 33.26 ns, 62 ns and 116.73 ns RMS strength, and 2.00 mm, 3.40 mm and 6.70 mm of correlation length, respectively. The estimated speed values were obtained as a function of the vibration frequency for both the non-aberrated and aberrated cases. The estimated mean shear wave speed values in the presence of aberration showed only a 3% variation from those obtained in the non-aberrated cases. These experimental results suggest that crawling wave sonoelastography is not significantly affected by aberration effects in conditions typically observed in applications such as abdominal and breast imaging.