Imaging of musculoskeletal tissue dynamics is currently an exploratory field with the goal of aiding rehabilitation and performance evaluation of pathological or asymptomatic patients. In this pilot study, initial elasticity assessments of the biceps brachii were conducted in a novel crawling wave sonoelastography (CWS) system implemented on a research ultrasound instrument with graphical processing unit capabilities, displaying quantitative elasticity values at 4 frames per second. The CWS system computes the tissue stiffness with the generation of an interference pattern from external vibrators, which can overcome depth limitations of imaging systems with internal excitation sources. Validation on gelatin-based phantoms reported low bias of elasticity values (4.7%) at low excitation frequencies. Preliminary results on in vivo muscle characterization are in accordance with average elast...

Crawling Waves Sonoelastography (CWS) is an elastography technique based on an interference pattern produced by the application of two external vibration sources. In this study, a 3D printed holder was designed to overcome the compatibility limitations of normal excitation modules for different ultrasound systems, previously developed in the literature. This holder was assembled with a transducer and two voice coil actuators, and its performance was tested in homogeneous and inclusion tissue-mimicking phantom. A phase derivative estimator was used to reconstruct the shear wave speed (SWS) map. The coefficient of variation (CV), bias and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) were used as quantitative metrics for comparison. These metrics have shown a comparable SWS estimation in the background (SWSb) of the homogeneous phantom with previous studies (e.g. SWSb = 3.58± 0.42 m/s). In the same way, ...