A Single Transducer Transaxial Compression Technique for the Estimation of Sound Speed in Biological Tissues

In this paper we report an extension to the TACT method for the estimation of sound speed with a single transducer to any depth. This method is based on the hypothesis that the displacement of the tissue caused by transaxial compression follows a theoretical function which we derive analytically. In this method, as in the original TACT, a transducer imparts an accurate transaxial compression to the tissue, and the corresponding change in the arrival time of an echo at a range of interest is measured. This procedure results in a biased speed estimate whose value is range dependent. The theoretical function is fitted to the experimental estimates, from which the unbiased sound speed is then computed.