Abstract:
Liver fibrosis is the intermediate stage from chronic liver disease to cirrhosis, the quantification of stiffness of different liver fibrosis stages has important significance to clinic application. To overcome the shortcomings that elasticity detection is not yet accurate to quantitatively measure the stiffness of liver fibrosis, a new method based on acoustic radiation force impulse (ARFI) for the elastic coefficient quantification of liver tissue is proposed. In this paper, ultrasound echo signals are collected before and after the elastic tissue pushed by acoustic radiation forces to implement the strain detection by the cumulative phase autocorrelation, and the results shows that the proposed method is feasible to assess the degree of liver fibrosis. The relationship between the elasticity coefficient and the strain of the stimulated tissue is established by the Voigt viscoelastic model to obtain the absolute elastic modulus of different stages of liver fibrosis. Experiments on different fibrosis stages of rabbit liver show that the longitudinal displacement obtained using single radiation force is not stable, so the average longitudinal displacement under a variety of intensity and pulse length radiation forces is used. The elastic coefficients of the different stages of liver fibrosis are:
F0:(11.95±1.91) kPa,
F1:(13.28±1.89) kPa,
F2:(15.40±1.98) kPa,
F3:(16.83±2.01) kPa,
F4:(18.52±2.28) kPa. Results illustrate that the rabbit liver with different levels of liver fibrosis is distinguished and the elastic parameters are obtained. This result provides a new means for the accurate examination and diagnosis of liver fibrosis in clinic.