Assessing the Impact of ARF Excitation Beam Width and Tracking Beam Concurrency on DoPIo Imaging Performance in a Calibrated Phantom

Double-profile intersection (DoPIo) ultrasound combines two displacement profiles capturing identical tissue motion following an acoustic radiation force (ARF) push to estimate shear elastic modulus via an empirically derived model. However, the displacement-tracking scheme may be impacted by differences in focal configurations for both the push and track beams. A wider push beam imparts a more uniform displacement gradient than narrow ARF pushes for on-axis tracking beams, while the simultaneous formation of two displacement profiles from a single, wide transmit pulse enables the tracking of identical scatterer distributions at the cost of diminished differences between the two displacement profiles. In silico experiments suggested that DoPIo acquisitions performed using a wide ARF push beam and simultaneous tracking provided the most accurate and precise elasticity estimates. While all four combinations of parameters enabled the differentiation of a soft inclusion within a stiff background in vitro, elasticity estimates on a commercially calibrated phantom were consistently overestimated.