Аpplication of shear wave elastography for differential diagnosis of clinical and morphological types of acute pancreatitis

Introduction. The incidence of acute pancreatitis increases every year. Early diagnosis of the necrotic type of acute pancreatitis is still relevant.Purpose. To reveal the informativeness of Elasticity Imaging Techniques for differential diagnosis of clinical and morphological types of acute pancreatitis.Material and methods. Shear wave sonoelastometry (ElastPQ-pSWE) was performed for 19 patients with acute edematous pancreatitis, and 13 patients with acute necrotizing pancreatitis. The control group consisted of 30 healthy volunteers.Results. In comparison with the control group, the stiffness of the pancreatic parenchyma was 1,3 times higher in the edematous form of AP (p3=0,0013, p6=0,007, p8=0,0024) and 5,3 times in the necrotic form of AP (p3=3,3e-5, p6=8e-07, p8=7,1e-8) and amounted to 5,16±1,34 kPa and 20,55±8,39 kPa, respectively, versus 3,86±1,04 kPa.Conclusions. Elasticity Imaging Techniques with shear wave technology provides an additional criterion for differential diagnosis of clinical and morphological types of acute pancreatitis.

Fusing electrical and elasticity imaging

Electrical and elasticity imaging are promising modalities for a suite of different applications, including medical tomography, non-destructive testing and structural health monitoring. These emerging modalities are capable of providing remote, non-invasive and low-cost opportunities. Unfortunately, both modalities are severely ill-posed nonlinear inverse problems, susceptive to noise and modelling errors. Nevertheless, the ability to incorporate complimentary datasets obtained simultaneously offers mutually beneficial information. By fusing electrical and elastic modalities as a joint problem, we are afforded the possibility to stabilize the inversion process via the utilization of auxiliary information from both modalities as well as joint structural operators. In this study, we will discuss a possible approach to combine electrical and elasticity imaging in a joint reconstruction problem giving rise to novel multi-modality applications for use in both medical and structural engineering. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Synergistic tomographic image reconstruction: part 1’.