Arterial stiffness is an important biomarker for many cardiovascular diseases. Shear wave elastography is a recent technique aimed at estimating local arterial stiffness using guided wave inversion (GWI), i.e. matching the computed and measured wave dispersion. This paper develops and validates a new GWI approach by synthesizing various recent observations and algorithms: (a) refinements to signal processing to obtain more accurate experimental dispersion curves; (b) an efficient forward model to compute theoretical dispersion curves for immersed, incompressible cylindrical waveguides; (c) an optimization framework based on the recent observation that the measured dispersion curve is multimodal, i.e. it matches for not one but two different wave modes in two different frequency ranges. The resulting inversion approach is validated using extensive experimental data from rubber tube phantoms, not only for modulus estimation but also to simultaneously estimate modulus and wall thickness. The observations indicate that the modulus estimates are best performed with the information on wall thickness. The approach, which takes less than half a minute to run, is shown to be accurate, with the modulus estimated with less than 4% error for 70% of the experiments.

动脉僵硬度是许多心血管疾病的重要生物标志物。剪切波弹性成像是一项最新技术，旨在使用导波反演 (GWI) 估计局部动脉硬度，即匹配计算和测量的波分散。本文通过综合各种最近的观察和算法来开发和验证一种新的 GWI 方法：（a）改进信号处理以获得更准确的实验色散曲线；(b) 计算浸入式不可压缩圆柱形波导的理论色散曲线的有效正演模型；(c) 基于最近观察的优化框架，即测量的频散曲线是多峰的，即它在两个不同的频率范围内匹配不是一个而是两个不同的波模。使用来自橡胶管体模的大量实验数据验证了所得的反演方法，不仅用于模量估计，还用于同时估计模量和壁厚。观察结果表明，模量估计最好使用壁厚信息进行。该方法运行时间不到半分钟，被证明是准确的，在 70% 的实验中，模量估计误差小于 4%。