Current strain imaging methods display frame-to-frame strain which is related to the tangent or cord modulus of the material. The secant modulus images show the distribution of relative intrinsic properties that are obtained with constraint functions that trade off spatial resolution for contrast and a reduction in artifacts. Our goal was to compare frame-to-frame strain images, accumulated strain images and relative secant modulus images of in vivo breast tissue to determine their relative merits for distinguishing between benign and malignant lesions. Initial comparisons of accumulated strain images and conventional strain images show that accumulated strain images provide better lesion boundary definition and that provides additional information for distinguishing between benign and malignant solid breast lesions. There are tradeoffs between accumulated strain images and secant modulus images. The advantages of accumulated strain images are the ability to retain changing lesion contrast and higher spatial resolution. The secant modulus images provide a quantitative difference in the elastic modulus but lower spatial resolution.
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