AN ARTIFACT IN SUPERSONIC SHEAR WAVE ELASTOGRAPHY

Supersonic shear wave elastography is a novel ultrasound technology that allows objective evaluation of soft tissue stiffness. The purpose of this study is to report an artifact in supersonic shear wave elastography that may strongly affect the accuracy and quality of the measurement of soft tissue stiffness, and to step-by-step describe how the artifact was found and how it was verified by a series of experiments under different conditions. There were a total of three longitudinal band-like artifacts, 1.3 cm apart from each other on the entire image along the length of the SuperLinear SL15-4 transducer surface, with the middle one at the center of the image. When using supersonic shear wave elastography, users should be keenly aware of the possible occurrence of the artifact and avoid it by choosing the quantification measurement regions of interest (ROIs) away from the artifact regions. (C) 2016 World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicine & Biology.