Skin elastic properties change during a cutaneous disorder or in the aging process. Deep knowledge of skin layers helps monitoring and diagnosing structural changes. High frequency ultrasound (HF-US) has been recently introduced to diagnose and evaluate some dermatological disorders in the clinical practice. US elastography adds elasticity information of the analyzed tissue. In particular, harmonic elastography estimates the speed of shear waves produced by external vibration sources, in order to relate the shear wave speed to the Young's modulus. In the epidermis and dermis layers, shear waves are not generated; in contrast, surface acoustic waves (SAWs) exist as they propagate in the top of the tissue. This study uses crawling wave sonoelastography for the estimation of SAWs in human thigh dermis in vivo. Experiments were performed in ten volunteers in the range of 200 - 500 Hz. As oth...

Skin diseases cause changes in the elasticity of the skin. Recently, a new ultrasound method which combines crawling waves elastography with a high-frequency ultrasound (HF-US) system was reported for the estimation of skin elasticity. This study applies crawling waves method with an HF-US system in homogeneous and heterogeneous phantoms with similar shear wave speeds found in the literature to validate this technique. In addition, estimation performance was compared between the Phase Derivative (PD) estimator and the Regularized Wave-length Average Velocity Estimator (R-WAVE). Results corroborate the feasibility of this method. Additionally, it suggests that R-WAVE estimator can provide better measurements than PD with a lower coefficient of variation and fewer artifacts. © COPYRIGHT SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Breast cancer is a public health problem with ? 1.7 million new cases per year worldwide and with several limitations in the state-of-art screening techniques. Ultrasound elastography involves a set of techniques intended to facilitate the noninvasive diagnosis of cancer. Among these, Vibro-elastography is an ultrasound-based technique that employs external mechanical excitation to infer the elastic properties of soft tissue. In this paper, we evaluate the Vibro-elastography performance in the differentiation of benign and malignant breast lesions. For this study, a group of 18 women with clinically confirmed tumors or suspected malignant breast lesions were invited to participate. For each volunteer, an elastogram was obtained, and the mean elasticity of the lesion and the adjacent healthy tissue were calculated. After the acquisition, the volunteers underwent core-needle biopsy. The hi...