《A NOVEL NONCONTACT ULTRASOUND INDENTATION SYSTEM》.pdf

Ultrasound in Med. Biol., Vol. 31, No. 6, pp. 817–826, 2005 Copyright © 2005 World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicine Biology Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0301-5629/05/$–see front matter doi:10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2004.12.023 ● Original Contribution A NOVEL NONCONTACT ULTRASOUND INDENTATION SYSTEM FOR MEASUREMENT OF TISSUE MATERIAL PROPERTIES USING WATER JET COMPRESSION M. H. LU, Y. P. ZHENG, and Q. H. HUANG Jockey Club Rehabilitation Engineering Center, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China (Received 19 July 2004; revised 17 December 2004; in final form 30 December 2004) Abstract—This study is aimed to develop a novel noncontact ultrasonic indentation system for measuring quantitative mechanical properties of soft tissues, which are increasingly important for tissue assessment and characterization. The key idea of this method is to use a water jet as an indenter to compress the soft tissue while at the same time as a medium for an ultrasound beam to propagate through. The use of water jet indentation does not require a rigid compressor in front of the focused high frequency ultrasound transducer to compress the tissue, so that the additional attenua