Accelerometer and elastography

Ultrasound elastography is a new and developing. Elastography is based on tissue hardness and tumor hardness differences. Most malignant tumors are hard while most benign tumors and tumor like conditions and cysts differ in hardness from malignant tumors.

Area of hardness also differs in malignant and benign lesions. In malignant tumors area of hardness extents beyond visible tumor on gray scale. While most benign lesions are similar in size on both grey scale and elastography.

In elastography lateral displacement of tissue it's calculated to compute hardness of tissue.

Manual compression elastography is limited since the amount of compression is unknown. This can be easily improved by adding an accelerometer to ultrasound transducer. With an accelerometer embedded to transducer the computer can know the amount of vertical displacement occurred to transducer in unit time. This can add value to manual compression elastography. Electronic accelerometers (MEMS) can be purchased for less than ten dollars. The real work might be in software programming calculating actual amount of tissue stiffness from vertical displacement of transducer.

There are other types of elastography. One senses the pulsation of nearby vasculature and calculates tissue stiffness according to pulsations.

Another technology uses shear waves produced by transducer to create an stiffness map of tissue. Shear wave elastography can quantitatively calculate accurate maps of stiffness in units of kPa.