Elastography comprises a set of modalities that image the biomechanical properties of soft tissues for disease detection and diagnosis. Quasi-static ultrasound elastography, in particular, tracks sub-surface displacements resulting from an applied surface force. The local displacement information and measured surface loads may be used to compute a parametric summary of biomechanical properties; however, the inverse problem is under- determined, limiting most techniques to estimating a single linear-elastic parameter. We previously described a new method to develop mechanical models using a combination of computational mechanics and machine learning that circumvents the limitations associated with the inverse problem. The Autoprogressive method weaves together finite element analysis and artificial neural networks (ANNs) to develop empirical models of mechanical behavior using only measured force-displacement data. We are extending that work by incorporating spatial information with the material properties. Previously, the ANNs accepted only a strain vector input and computed the corresponding stress, meaning any spatial information was encoded in the finite element mesh. Now, using a pair of ANNs working in tandem with spatial coordinates included as part of the input, these new Cartesian ANNs are able to learn the spatially varying mechanical behavior of complex media. We show that a single Cartesian ANN is able to describe the same mechanical behavior of an object that previously required at least two ANNs. Furthermore, we show the new ANNs can learn complex material property distributions and reconstruct images of the Young’s modulus distribution, not merely classify, filter, or otherwise process an existing image. For the first time, we present results using Cartesian neural networks within the Autoprogressive Method to form elastic modulus images.
KEYWORDS: Tissues, Ultrasonography, Ultrasonics, Diagnostics, Inverse problems, Data modeling, Medical imaging, Machine learning, Finite element methods, Neural networks, 3D modeling, Image segmentation, Data acquisition
Biomechanical properties of soft tissues can provide information regarding the local health status. Often the cells in pathological tissues can be found to form a stiff extracellular environment, which is a sensitive, early diagnostic indicator of disease. Quasi-static ultrasonic elasticity imaging provides a way to image the mechanical properties of tissues. Strain images provide a map of the relative tissue stiffness, but ambiguities and artifacts limit its diagnostic value. Accurately mapping intrinsic mechanical parameters of a region may increase diagnostic specificity. However, the inverse problem, whereby force and displacement estimates are used to estimate a constitutive matrix, is ill conditioned. Our method avoids many of the issues involved with solving the inverse problem, such as unknown boundary conditions and incomplete information about the stress field, by building an empirical model directly from measured data. Surface force and volumetric displacement data gathered during imaging are used in conjunction with the AutoProgressive method to teach artificial neural networks the stress-strain relationship of tissues. The Autoprogressive algorithm has been successfully used in many civil engineering applications and to estimate ocular pressure and corneal stiffness; here, we are expanding its use to any tissues imaged ultrasonically. We show that force-displacement data recorded with an ultrasound probe and displacements estimated at a few points in the imaged region can be used to estimate the full stress and strain vectors throughout an entire model while only assuming conservation laws. We will also demonstrate methods to parameterize the mechanical properties based on the stress-strain response of trained neural networks. This method is a fundamentally new approach to medical elasticity imaging that for the first time provides full stress and strain vectors from one set of observation data.
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