Diagnostic & Dense Breast Ultrasound
Diagnostic & Dense Breast Ultrasound
Our new state of the art breast ultrasound machine has Shear-wave ultrasonic elastography technology. This allows us to visualize and measure tissue elasticity which is extremely important for women with dense breasts. Shear-wave has been shown to be useful for differentiating between benign and malignant breast lesions.
Shear-wave elastography (SWE) is a recently developed ultrasound technique that can visualize and measure tissue elasticity. In breast ultrasonography it has been suggested that SWE enhances the diagnostic performance of ultrasonography, potentially improving the specificity of conventional ultrasonography using the Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System criteria.
Elastography is an imaging modality based on tissue stiffness or hardness, which is analogous to clinical palpation with ultrasonography for a malignancy.
Unlike a physical examination, which allows only the subjective judgment of the stiffness of a lesion, elastography has the potential to quantify stiffness. In breast ultrasonography, two elastographic techniques are popular and differ in the type of stress applied: strain and shear-wave elastography . Strain elastography produces an image based on the relative displacement of the tissue from an external (manual compression of the transducer) or patient source. It is difficult to measure the amount of the force or stress during compression, and the absolute elasticity cannot be calculated Meanwhile, SWE using the acoustic radiation force induced by the ultrasound push pulse generated by the transducer provides quantitative elasticity parameters, as well as displaying a visual color overlay of elastic information in real time.
