Ultrasound shear wave elastography is a modality used for noninvasive, quantitative evaluation of soft tissue mechanical properties. A common way of exploring the tissue viscoelasticity is through analyzing the shear wave velocity dispersion curves. The variation of phase velocity with frequency or wavelength is called the dispersion curve. An increase of the available spectrum to be used for phase velocity estimation is meaningful for a tissue dispersion analysis in vivo. A number of available methods for dispersion relation estimation exist which can give diffuse results due the presence of noise in the measured data. In this work we compare six selected methods used for dispersion curve calculation in viscoelastic materials. Non-parametric, parametric and high-resolution methods were examined and compared. We tested selected methods on digital phantom data created using finite-difference-based method in tissue-mimicking viscoelastic media as well as on the experimental custom tissue-mimicking phantoms. In addition, we evaluated the algorithms with different levels of added white Gaussian noise to the shear wave particle velocity from numerical phantoms. Tests conducted showed that more advanced methods can offer better frequency resolution, and less variance than the fast Fourier transform. In addition, the non-parametric Blackman-Tukey approach exhibits similar performance and can be interchangeably used for shear wave phase velocity dispersion curves calculation.

中文翻译：

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使用非参数、参数和高分辨率方法计算粘弹性组织模拟材料的色散曲线

超声剪切波弹性成像是一种用于软组织机械特性的无创、定量评估的方式。探索组织粘弹性的常用方法是通过分析剪切波速度色散曲线。相速度随频率或波长的变化称为色散曲线。用于相速度估计的可用频谱的增加对于体内组织色散分析是有意义的。存在许多用于色散关系估计的可用方法，由于测量数据中存在噪声，它们可以给出扩散结果。在这项工作中，我们比较了用于粘弹性材料色散曲线计算的六种选定方法。检查和比较了非参数、参数和高分辨率方法。我们在模拟组织粘弹性介质以及实验性定制模拟组织体模中使用基于有限差分的方法创建的数字体模数据上测试了选定的方法。此外，我们评估了具有不同级别的高斯白噪声添加到数值模型的剪切波粒子速度的算法。进行的测试表明，与快速傅立叶变换相比，更先进的方法可以提供更好的频率分辨率和更少的方差。此外，非参数 Blackman-Tukey 方法表现出类似的性能，可以互换用于横波相速度频散曲线计算。我们评估了具有不同级别的高斯白噪声添加到数值模型的剪切波粒子速度的算法。进行的测试表明，与快速傅立叶变换相比，更先进的方法可以提供更好的频率分辨率和更少的方差。此外，非参数 Blackman-Tukey 方法表现出类似的性能，可以互换用于横波相速度频散曲线计算。我们评估了具有不同级别的高斯白噪声添加到数值模型的剪切波粒子速度的算法。进行的测试表明，与快速傅立叶变换相比，更先进的方法可以提供更好的频率分辨率和更少的方差。此外，非参数 Blackman-Tukey 方法表现出类似的性能，可以互换用于横波相速度频散曲线计算。