Angle matching in intravascular elastography

Intravascular elastography is a new technique to obtain mechanical properties of the vessel wall and plaque. Mechanical information of vascular tissue is important for characterisation of different plaque components, detection of plaque vulnerability and thus choosing the proper interventional technique. The feasibility of the technique is investigated using phantoms and diseased human arteries. These studies demonstrated that elastography reveals information that is unavailable or inconclusive from the echogram alone. The technique is based on the principle that tissue strain is directly related to its mechanical properties. In intravascular elastography, the tissue is compressed using different intravascular pressures. The strain is determined using cross-correlation techniques of the radio frequency (r.f.) signals. Reliable strain estimates are only obtained when signals of corresponding tissue are correlated. Owing to catheter motion, off-centre position and non-uniform rotation of the intravascular transducer, the r.f. traces at low and at high pressure may be misaligned. Four algorithms are tested to track the corresponding ultrasound signals. Three methods (l1norm, l2norm and cross-correlation) are applied on the r.f. signal and one (l1norm) on the envelope (speckle tracking). Simulations are performed to obtain a data set with a priori knowledge of the scattering particles positions in the tissue at high and low pressure. Different positions of the catheter in the lumen, compression levels of the material and signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) are investigated. Finally, these findings are corroborated with a phantom experiment in a water tank. From the simulations, it can be concluded that the speckle tracking algorithm has the best performance, under all circumstances. The performance decreases with larger eccentricity of the catheter and larger compression of the material. The SNR is only of minor influence. The speckle tracking algorithm has also the best performance in the phantom experiment. The performance of the speckle tracking algorithm is better than the three r.f.-based algorithms. For intravascular elastography, implementation of this method may improve the quality of the elastogram.