Correlation of elastographic tissue strain images with mechanically scanned modulus images

Tissue stiffness is generally known to be associated with pathological changes. Elastography, on the other hand, is capable of imaging tissue strain, which may or may not be well correlated with tissue stiffness. Hence a quantitative comparison between the elastographic tissue strain images and the corresponding tissue modulus images needs to be performed to evaluate the usefulness of elastography in imaging tissue stiffness properties. We find that under certain conditions, such a quantitative comparison is feasible. Preliminary results indicate a correlation of at least 0.6 between tissue stiffness maps and strain maps in some typical bovine muscle tissues.