Advanced imaging and visualization for computer assisted interventions: motivation, state-of-art and future challenges - Elastography imaging - MISS 2014 (13)

Prof. Tim Salcudean (University of British Columbia, CA) was one of the speakers of Medical Imaging Summer School (Sicily, July 28-August 1, 2014), here you can find his lecture 1: "Advanced imaging and visualization for computer assisted interventions: motivation, state-of-art and future challenges - Elastography imaging".

Abstract. Elastography imaging is concerned with the measurement and display of tissue strain or with the identification of tissue intrinsic properties from the measured strain in response to a mechanical excitation. It can be thought of as a form of objective, remote palpation. 

Elastography as an imaging modality presents us with a rich and beautiful set of inter-disciplinary problems, and includes tissue actuator design, specific image sequence design, motion estimation from images, viscoelastic parameter estimation from motion, and computational acceleration of these to the level where real-time performance is achieved.

We start with a tutorial introduction to elastography, including basic imaging principles and an overview of the field. We also present our own contribution to this type of imaging, including high frequency motion estimation and solutions of the inverse problems in elastography. Both ultrasound and magnetic resonance elastography is discussed.

We describe applications to prostate and breast cancer imaging, to image registration, and to procedure simulation exemplified in a prostate brachytherapy simulator and treatment planner.

Shooting: Lorenzo Di Silvestro, Mauro Sodano
Editing and post-production: Lorenzo Di Silvestro, Agata Ventura