Pol Grasland-Mongrain edited When_a_laser_beam_of__1.tex  over 8 years ago

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We hypothesized in this study that a laser beam in a soft tissue can nevertheless induce shear waves in addition to compression waves. Shear waves have drawn an increasing interest in medical imaging, with the development for the last two decades of shear wave elastography techniques \cite{muthupillai1995magnetic}, \cite{sandrin2002shear}. As its names indicates, this term covers the techniques used to measure or map the elastic properties of biological tissues using shear wave propagation. The shear modulus, directly proportional to Young's modulus in soft tissues, varies indeed of several orders of magnitude in human body and potentially offers an excellent contrast. As a shear wave propagates in an organ at a speed proportional to the square root of the shear modulus, measuring its speed throughout the organ allows to compute the shear modulus of the tissue \cite{10385964}. Shear waves can be induced by an external vibrator \cite{muthupillai1995magnetic}, a focused acoustic beam \cite{sarvazyan1998shear}, \cite{11937286}, the Lorentz force\cite{grasland2014elastoEMarticle}, or natural body displacements \cite{gallot2011passive}. Shear wave elastography techniques have been successfully applied for the detection of various pathologies in organs such as the liver \cite{sandrin2003transient}, the breast \cite{goddi2012breast}, \cite{sinkus2005viscoelastic}, the prostate \cite{cochlin2002elastography}, \cite{souchon2003visualisation}, the bladder \cite{25574440} and the eye cornea \cite{tanter2009high}, \cite{22627517}.  In this study, we show that shear waves can be induced in soft tissues  by a laser beam, with a model of the underlying physical phenomenon. We also applied the technique in a biological tissue to evaluate its potential application in shear wave elastography. The Z axis is defined here as the laser beam axis, and the ultrasound imaging plane is in the YZ plane, as illustrated by Figure \ref{Figure1}.