Experimental study on the reconstruction of elastic modulus distribution based on the 3-D displacement vector

Experimental study on the reconstruction of elastic modulus distribution using the 3-D displacement vector, which have been proposed by us, were performed. In order to measure the 3-D displacement vector distribution induced by static deformations, a ring array transducer with overall 16 elements and with a center frequency of 5.0 MHz was manufactured. In the experiments with the agar-based phantom including a spherical inclusion, the 3-D volume data sets of the rf signals were acquired by mechanically scanning the probe, and were used for measuring 3-D displacement vectors and reconstructing the Young's modulus distribution. The experimental results showed that the obtained image was close to the true distribution and 3-D reconstruction produced more quantitative image with higher contrast than the 2-D reconstruction.