Robotic Assistance for Standardized Compression Ultrasound Elastography

Abstract

2D ultrasound elastography is crucial for diagnosing superficial organ diseases, favored for its simplicity and affordability. However, it is limited to qualitative assessments, leading to potential diagnostic inconsistencies due to the dependence on clinician experience and operator skill. Integrating robotic technology into compression-based elastography offers a promising approach for achieving standardized and quantitative diagnostics. This paper presents a robotic-technology-based quantitative measurement scheme for compression-based elastography, focusing on utilizing the medical robotic platform; this study quantitatively performs compression elastography using ultrasound image features to determine the Young’s modulus of tissues. The scheme includes refined measurement methods for better accuracy and robustness, such as adjusting the contact area. The proposed method is validated on self-made phantoms. The results indicate that within the typical range of low Young’s modulus values for superficial organs, this method can accurately measure the Young’s modulus of embedded tissues and preliminarily verify that there is a good linear relationship between the Young’s modulus and some ultrasound image feature parameters within a certain range of Young’s modulus values.