Talk:Elastography

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Commentary by Don Rockey on the uses of TEG in diagnosis of cirrhosis: JFW |  T@lk  07:17, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

== New ultrasound technology - Acoustoelastography - EchoSoft from University of Wisconsin-Madison and Echometrix - give quantitative data about mechanical properties, like stiffness, and status of musculoskeletal (tendon and ligament) tissue ==

New ultrasound technology - Acoustoelastography - EchoSoft from University of Wisconsin-Madison (Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation) and Echometrix - waves not just for vision, but give quantitative data about mechanical characteristics and properties, like stiffness, and functional status of musculoskeletal (tendon and ligament) tissue

Someone at http://www.sorehand.org/ (repetitive strain injury mailing list) posted a link about a new type of ultrasound technology.

http://www.news.wisc.edu/23139

Echometrix was just granted a patent on September 19.

http://wisconsintechnologycouncil.com/newsroom/?ID=2708

Should there be a Acoustoelastography section under Elastography?

I grabbed some search results from the top of Google scholar.

>(Research has shown that Google Scholar puts high weight especially oncitation counts[20]and words included in a document's title.[21]As a consequence the first search results are often highly cited articles.)

I'll dump some of what I found so far here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iCJE0d1cpUneSrtiEK3oi2H9nuYX812gL6g1rFdfP20/edit#

If you have the time, it's worth reading some of it.

I grabbed the most prominent articles, extracted abstracts, introductions, and concluding discussions, segmented by sentences, made headings, and created a table of contents.

The various articles frequently reference the same thing, so as you read, you sort of get the gist of what they're talking about. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bboyjkang2 (talk • contribs) 22:59, 16 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I think the operative word there is "new". If you do any poking into elastography reviews, you'll find that there are dozens of different elastography techniques. I've tried to focus the article on those techniques that are commercialized and (widely) used in the clinic rather than on every proof-of-concept that has been done over the years.  Oreo Priest  talk 22:21, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

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Please note the " Wikipedia articles about a company or organization are not an extension of their website" piece of that.


 * Historical background

Since then, the practice of palpation has become widespread, and it is considered an effective method of detecting tumours and other pathologies.

Manual palpation, however, suffers from several important limitations: it is limited to tissues accessible to the physician's hand, it is distorted by any intervening tissue, and it is qualitative but not quantitative. Elastography, the measurement of tissue stiffness, seeks to address these challenges.

There are numerous elastographic techniques, in development stages from early research to extensive clinical application. Each of these techniques works in a different way. What all methods have in common is that they create a distortion in the tissue, observe and process the tissue response to infer the mechanical properties of the tissue, and then display the results to the operator, usually as an image. Each elastographic method is characterized by the way it does each of these things.
 * How it works==

To image the mechanical properties of tissue, we need to see how it behaves when deformed. There are three main ways of inducing a distortion to observe. These are:
 * Inducing a distortion===
 * Pushing/deforming or vibrating the surface of the body (skin) or organ (prostate) with a probe or a tool,
 * Using radiation force of focused ultrasound to remotely create a 'push' inside the tissue, and
 * Using distortions created by normal physiological processes, e.g. pulse or heartbeat.

The primary way elastographic techniques are categorized is by what imaging modality (type) they use to observe the response. Elastographic techniques use ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and pressure/stress sensors in tactile imaging (TI). There are a handful of other methods that exist as well.
 * Observing the response===

The observation of the tissue response can take many forms. In terms of the image obtained, it can be 1-D (i.e. a line), 2-D (a plane) or 3-D (a volume), or just a single value, and it can either be a video or a single image. In most cases, the result is displayed to the operator along with a conventional image of the tissue, which shows where in the tissue the different stiffness values occur.

Once the response has been observed, the stiffness can be calculated from it. Most elastography techniques find the stiffness of tissue based on one of two main principles: Some techniques will simply display the distortion and/or response, or the wave speed to the operator, while others will compute the stiffness (specifically the Young's modulus or similar shear modulus) and display that instead. Some techniques present results quantitatively, while others only present qualitative (relative) results.
 * Processing and presentation===
 * For a given applied force (stress), stiffer tissue deforms (strains) less than does softer tissue.
 * Mechanical waves (specifically shear waves) travel faster through stiffer tissue than through softer tissue.

Because MRI is not limited by air or bone, it can access some tissues ultrasound cannot, notably the brain. It also has the advantage of being more uniform across operators and less dependent on operator skill than most methods of ultrasound elastography.
 * MRE section

MR elastography has made significant advances over the past few years with acquisition times down to a minute or less and has been used in a variety of medical applications including cardiology research on living human hearts. MR elastography's short acquisition time also make it competitive with other elastography techniques.

-- Jytdog (talk) 21:47, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Well let's start by getting one thing out of the way: I have no horse in this race. I am not employed by any company, nor am I trying to promote my research or anyone else's. My sole interest is having a reasonable (and reasonably complete, at least in what's important) survey of the topic that is somewhat accessible to a non-technical audience.
 * I do applaud your aggressive trimming of material on tactile imaging. It is an obscure modality and I believe the "Wikipedian" in question is mainly interested in promoting it.
 * On the other hand, I'm afraid your aggressive axing of every sentence of general explanation not immediately followed by a citation crosses into the disruptive. I do know you're acting in good faith, but I'm concerned that this is to the detriment of the article.
 * As per WP:BLUESKY, I hadn't tried to affix a citation to every sentence, but rather tried to give an explanation to laypeople.
 * Could we try a different approach? Could you please trust that I'm acting in good faith for the good of the encyclopedia? I've been here for 12 years and have over 15,000 edits, and its quality is my only priority. Could you point out what, specifically, you think is questionable, dubious, or pushing a viewpoint?
 * With this in mind, I'm now going to hit the revert button. I sadly don't have the time to add citations line-by-line, so if you don't want to cooperate, you'll get your way, and the page will lose most of its content. So please, point out what you think is actually problematic and we can work out a solution.
 * Cheers,  Oreo Priest  talk 22:12, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your note!
 * I looked over your edits and had no sense that you have any kind of conflict (I would have asked if I thought you might - and I really would have asked) (About your edit note here, the COI tag was really cleanup after Egorov, whose work now remains in the page, since you reverted.)
 * The mission question - yes my sense is that you (as a lead editor on this page) have been trying to make a decent encyclopedia article, explaining this kind of complicated stuff in reasonably plain language and i am grateful for that. Thanks for that!
 * I do have a sense that this page is kind of personal essay-ish, and not being driven by summarizing high quality sources. Many primary sources here and very old ones.  That is indeed the place where we differ.  To the extent we are not summarizing high quality refs then stuff like what Egorov was doing slips right in.  Letting high quality refs drive things has multiple benefits... I will try to swing around and work on finding recent refs and seeing what of the above can be restore. Happy to collaborate to build!  So much cleaning to do.. always always.... Jytdog (talk) 22:18, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm glad we could work this out amicably! If you are looking for sources that could buttress the explanations of different types, the review articles by Wells and by Parker are a good start (although no longer super recent). For the explanation of how it works, however, I'm not sure where exactly you'd find simple explanations of technical details of new technologies; in my experience most sources that explain technical details also use technical language. Anyways, good luck with your efforts trying to reinforce the article!  Oreo Priest  talk 22:36, 2 April 2018 (UTC) (Oh, and I don't think I did revert any of your Egorov deletions, for what it's worth.)