Performance of Shear Wave Speed Measurements by Using Reverberant Optical Coherence Elastography

Elasticity of biological tissue is important to understand its properties, which could play important role in medical diagnosis and treatment, especially in its early stage of pathology. Optical Coherence Elastography (OCE) has been intensively developed for mapping the elasticity contrast of various biological tissues. OCE techniques based on tracking of shear vibrational wave propagation is one of the most popular techniques. The high speed of shear wave propagation in biological media leads to challenges in both data acquisition and data processing. Recently, the concept of reverberant shear wave fi eld has been applied to OCE, called Rev3D-OCE. In this work, we experimentally investigate the performance of Rev3D-OCE to differentiate gelatin phantoms with a slight difference of elasticity. We verifi ed that Rev3D-OCE can differentiate different shear wave speeds associated with different concentrations of gelatin phantoms, where higher shear wave speed was observed in a higher concentration of the phantom as expected. The average shear wave speed of gelatin with 3 wt% and 4 wt% concentrations were measured as 1.3 ± 0.2 m/s and 1.5 ± 0.1 m/s with about 11% and 14% of errors as compared with that obtained by standard mechanical testing, respectively. In addition, the spatial resolution of Rev3D-OCE as determined from the edge response measurement at the boundary between two gelatins of 3 wt% and 4 wt% concentrations was measured to be 0.3 millimeters.