Real-time Shear Wave Elastography Implementation on a Portable Research Ultrasound System with GPU-accelerated Processing

In this work, we present a low-cost, portable, and fully configurable ultrasound system implementing 2-D real-time Shear Wave Elastography (SWE) imaging mode. To achieve that we have enhanced the transmit capabilities of the 256 TX/64 RX us4R-lite research system, developed by our team, to support push pulses generation. This system was combined with a signal processing pipeline reconstructing stiffness maps from raw RF data. Real-time imaging performance was provided by an efficient reconstruction algorithm execution that incorporated graphics processing unit (GPU). The overall system performance was assessed experimentally using an industry-standard elasticity Q/A phantom. Relevant reconstruction parameters were evaluated in terms of reconstruction time. The system achieved stiffness estimation with a bias <5% and SNR of 30 dB and was able to detect lesions of size >4 mm and various stiffness with CNR in the range of 13–17 dB. The system throughput of up to 5 fps has been achieved on a PC notebook equipped with NVIDIA RTX 3060 GPU.