Mitigating high frame rate demands in shear wave elastography using radial basis function-based reconstruction: An experimental phantom study

Background: Shear wave elastography (SWE) is a technique that quantifies tissue stiffness by assessing the speed of shear waves propagating after being excited by acoustic radiation force. SWE allows the quantification of elastic tissue properties and serves as an adjunct to conventional ultrasound techniques, aiding in tissue characterization. To capture this transient propagation of the shear wave, the ultrasound device must be able to reach very high frame rates. Methodology: In this paper, our aim is to relax the high frame rate requirement for SWE imaging. To this end, we propose lower frame rate SWE imaging followed by employing a 2-dimensional (2D) radial basis functions (RBF)-based interpolation. More specifically, the process involves obtaining low frame rate data and then temporal upsampling to reach a synthetic high frame rate data by inserting the ‘UpS-1’ image frames with missing values between two successive image frames (UpS: Upsampling rate). Finally, we apply the propo...