Limited element diverging wave-based quasi-static ultrasound elastography for prostate cancer application – Initial findings

Prostate cancer is one of the leading causes of mortality in males globally. As such, timely diagnosis of this disease can improve patients’ prognosis. X-ray CT and MRI are popular ways of performing diagnostic imaging; however, both these modalities have their challenges concerning cost and complexity. Ultrasound elastography is another technique that is useful in diagnosis, however, the current state-of-the-art methods utilize conventional focused beamforming (CFB) techniques which lead to using more number of transmit elements for better lateral resolution. In this study, we present a method of performing ultrasound elastography using limited element diverging beam synthetic aperture technique (DBSAT). This technique uses fewer transmit elements, considerably reducing the system complexity, while offering image quality better than that of CFB. With this method we achieve a Contrast-to-Noise Ratio (CNR) value of 17.13 dB and Contrast Ratio (CR) of 0.45 compared to CNR and CR values of 13.78 dB and 0.43 respectively, from using CFB.