About the project
Physical examination at the doctor’s office often involves palpation where the physician tries to feel the location, size, shape and stiffness of masses or organs in the body by touching. Sometimes, even the patients themselves can notice lumps or abnormalities in their body and refer to a physician. Examples include palpation for masses or abnormalities in breast, spleen, liver and thyroid. This method is very dependent on the skills of the physician, not sensitive for small deep tumors and not applicable for organs that are not reachable. Elastography is a quantitative imaging modality that is used for estimating tissue stiffness. In the case of myocardial elastography, myocardial stiffness of the heart is of interest and estimated values may potentially be used for diagnosis of diseases that cause abnormalities in the systolic or diastolic functions of the heart.
Objectives
We are interested in estimating myocardial stiffness using ultrasound time harmonic elastography by utilizing different methods which have been used in MR elastography, develop new methods for ultrasound elastography and eventually create 3D myocardial elasticity map of the heart.
Outcomes
Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death globally and a noninvasive, robust, and cost-effective diagnosis method can make a big impact. The project results will be used for estimating elastic properties of the myocardium in healthy individuals and comparing to patients with diseases such as myocardial fibrosis. The results can potentially be used to develop a clinical tool that can be additional to estimating blood velocities in the heart to assess the overall cardiac function.