Shao Jinhua, Wang Jinrui, Zhang Yizhuo, Cui Ligang, Liu Ke, Bai Jing
Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, PR China.
IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control. 2009 Jan;56(1):44-54. doi: 10.1109/TUFFC.2009.1004.
Different noninvasive or minimally invasive therapeutic ablation procedures can produce tissue necrosis associated with local-stiffness increase. Although elastography has been proved as a potential evaluation tool for many kinds of ablation-induced lesions, the application of subtraction technique in elastography to enhance the visualization of the ablation lesions has rarely been reported. In this paper, subtraction elastography is proposed to evaluate the ablation-induced lesions. Three models are constructed to simulate different kinds of ablated inclusions. The simulation results showed that subtraction elastography is superior to conventional elastography in detecting the ablation-induced lesions with higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR). The artifacts induced by elastographic signal processing algorithms can be largely reduced in subtraction elastography. In addition, subtraction elastography is less influenced by the stiff background and can provide more reliable boundary information about the lesion than conventional elastography. Furthermore, the feasibility of subtraction elastography is validated by an in vitro experiment of ethanol-induced hepatic lesions. The preliminary results of this work suggest that subtraction elastography may be a good option for the evaluation of ablationinduced lesions.
不同的非侵入性或微创治疗消融手术可产生与局部硬度增加相关的组织坏死。尽管弹性成像已被证明是评估多种消融诱导病变的潜在工具，但弹性成像中减法技术用于增强消融病变可视化的应用却鲜有报道。本文提出用减法弹性成像来评估消融诱导病变。构建了三种模型来模拟不同类型的消融内含物。模拟结果表明，减法弹性成像在检测消融诱导病变方面优于传统弹性成像，具有更高的信噪比（SNR）和对比噪声比（CNR）。减法弹性成像可大幅减少弹性成像信号处理算法产生的伪像。此外，减法弹性成像受硬背景的影响较小，与传统弹性成像相比，能提供更可靠的病变边界信息。此外，通过乙醇诱导肝损伤的体外实验验证了减法弹性成像的可行性。这项工作的初步结果表明，减法弹性成像可能是评估消融诱导病变的一个不错选择。
