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Application of Fourier analysis to clinical study of patterns of tissue movement
M Tristam1, D C Barbosa, D O Cosgrove
1Joint Department of Physics, Royal Marsden Hospital, Sutton, Surrey.
Abstract:
An analysis is made of the kinetics of human liver parenchyma in response to mechanical impulses arising in the heart and aorta, and the results are applied to predicting the time course of the correlation between two time-separated A-scans derived from various regions of the liver. Such predictions are found to correspond well with data derived clinically, both from volunteers and from patients with liver metastases, using a commercial, real-time sector scanner. On the basis of Fourier spectral features of the clinically derived correlation patterns, a clear quantitative separation was demonstrated between the kinetic response of three classes of tissue: normal liver in volunteers, metastatic deposits in liver of cancer patients, and histologically normal liver regions in the same patients.