Ultrasonic displacement and strain imaging of coronary arteries with a catheter array

Tissue elasticity can be estimated from displacement and strain images acquired under controlled deformation. We extend this approach for coronary arteries, deformed and imaged by an integrated angioplasty balloon and ultrasonic imaging probe. Because the lumen cross section of a severely occluded artery is generally not circular, we have also developed a technique to perform all motion computations in the reference frame of the lumen´s geometric center. This coordinate system is independent of the imaging catheter, and consequently referencing to this frame removes artifacts associated with probe motion within the balloon during deformation. Displacements and strains estimated by phase-sensitive correlation-based speckle tracking were used to distinguish arterial plaques in simulated coronary arteries of differing elastic moduli: hard, soft, and homogenous. We have also applied these methods to images of a homogeneous gelatin phantom collected with the integrated probe. The spatial dependence of these quantities shows good agreement with theoretically predicted values