Search

Torsion mechanical waves have the capability to characterize shear stiffness moduli of soft tissue. Under this hypothesis, a computational methodology is proposed to design and optimize a piezoelectrics-based transmitter and receiver to generate and measure the response of torsional ultrasonic waves. The procedure employed is divided into two steps: (i) a finite element method (FEM) is developed to obtain a transmitted and received waveform as well as a resonance frequency of a previous geometry validated with a semi-analytical simplified model and (ii) a probabilistic optimality criteria of the design based on inverse problem from the estimation of robust probability of detection (RPOD) to maximize the detection of the pathology defined in terms of changes of shear stiffness. This study collects different options of design in two separated models, in transmission and contact, respectively. The main contribution of this work describes a framework to establish such as forward, inverse and optimization procedures to choose a set of appropriate parameters of a transducer. This methodological framework may be generalizable for other different applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A torsional piezoelectric ultrasonic sensor design is proposed in this paper and computationally tested and optimized to measure shear stiffness properties of soft tissue. These are correlated with a number of pathologies like tumors, hepatic lesions and others. The reason is that, whereas compressibility is predominantly governed by the fluid phase of the tissue, the shear stiffness is dependent on the stroma micro-architecture, which is directly affected by those pathologies. However, diagnostic tools to quantify them are currently not well developed. The first contribution is a new typology of design adapted to quasifluids. A second contribution is the procedure for design optimization, for which an analytical estimate of the Robust Probability Of Detection, called RPOD, is presented for use as optimality criteria. The RPOD is formulated probabilistically to maximize the probability of detecting the least possible pathology while minimizing the effect of noise. The resulting optimal transducer has a resonance frequency of 28[kHz]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]