Multiparametric QUS Analysis for Placental Tissue Characterization

Project SWAVE 2.0: An overview of the study design for multimodal placental image acquisition and alignment

“…Elastography is a non-invasive technique where an external force is applied to measure the mechanical properties of tissue, such as shear wave speed and Young's modulus. The ultrasound radio frequency (RF) data acquired in SWAVE can further be processed to compute complementary acoustic properties, such as attenuation coefficient estimate, backscatter coefficient and effective scatterer size [9 , 10 , 12] . Young's modulus provides a measure of the tissue stiffness by computing the speed of the shear wave propagation.…”

“…Multiscale structural imaging including ultrasound (US) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) combines the high axial and lateral resolution achievable using US and the large field-of-view in MRI. More importantly, the quantitative counterparts of these modalities, qMRI (quantitative MRI) and QUS (quantitative ultrasound), can further offer complimentary information regarding the placental micro- and macro- structure, perfusion and function [ 2 , 10 , 15 ]. Among the qMRI techniques, Diffusion Weighted Imaging (DWI) provides a parametric apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) map, where the ADC value at any voxel represents the degree of water diffusion.…”