Mapping Heterogeneous Elastic Property Distribution of Soft Tissues Using Harmonic Motion Data: A Theoretical Study

Abstract

Characterizing heterogeneous elastic property distribution of soft tissues is of great importance in disease detection. In this paper, we investigate an inverse approach to map the heterogeneous material property distribution of soft solids using harmonic motion data. To examine the feasibility of this approach, a number of numerical examples are presented. We observe that the shear modulus distribution is recovered well using harmonic motion measurements. Compared to the static inverse approach, the proposed dynamic inverse method improves the quality of the recovered shear modulus distribution significantly. We also study the influence of the uncertainty in the driving frequency on the reconstruction results and observe that the influence is not very significant in recovering the shape of the inclusion. The proposed inverse algorithm has potential to be a promising tool to diagnose diseases in clinical medicine.