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Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, Ultrasound Quarterly, 4(31), p. 272-278, 2015

DOI: 10.1097/ruq.0000000000000204

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Detection and Measurement of Stones With Ultrasound Strain Elastography

Journal article published in 2015 by Qian Li ORCID, Lei Chen, Elkan F. Halpern, Anthony E. Samir
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

The sonoelastographic appearances of stones in a phantom were evaluated in this study. Ten stones were embedded into a tissue-mimicking meat phantom. The stone axial (vertical) and transverse (horizontal) dimensions measured by an electronic digital caliper, gray-scale ultrasound, and strain elastography (SE) were compared in 5 groups with stones embedded at different depths. In this study, physically measured axial and transverse stone dimensions were 1.17 to 6.86 and 1.30 to 11.15 mm, respectively. Strain elastography showed a characteristic 3-layer pattern associated with stones, comprising a superficial transition region, a hard region, and a deep transition region. As SE data were available in group 5, only data of groups 1 to 4 were analyzed. Compared with physical measurements, measurement mean errors of SE horizontal and SE vertical dimensions ranged from -0.20 to 0.42 mm and from -1.28 to -0.05 mm, respectively, in the 4 groups. Paired t testing demonstrated a significant horizontal dimension measurement error difference between B mode and SE method in group 4 (0.44 vs -0.20 mm, P < 0.05; F = 1.18, P > 0.05), but not in the other groups. Strain elastography horizontal dimension measurement error was not statistically correlated with stone size in the 4 groups. Strain elastography vertical dimension measurement error significantly correlated with stone size only in group 4 (P < 0.05). Preliminary results indicate that stone horizontal and vertical dimensions can be measured using SE in a soft tissue phantom, including when shadowing precludes measurement of vertical dimension on conventional 2-dimensional ultrasound. These results provide substantial motivation to further investigate SE as a modality to image stones in clinical practice.