Measuring Soft Tissue Elasticity by Monitoring Surface Acoustic Waves Using Image Plane Digital Holography

The detection of tumors in soft tissues, such as breast cancer, is important to achieve at the earliest stages of the disease to improve patient outcome. Tumors often exhibit a greater elastic modulus compared to normal tissues. In this paper, we report our first study to measure elastic properties of soft tissues by mapping the surface acoustic waves (SAWs) with image plane digital holography. The experimental results show that the SAW velocity is proportional to the square root of elastic modulus over a range from 3.7-122kPa in homogeneous tissue phantoms, consistent with Rayleigh wave theory. This technique also permits detection of the interface of two-layer phantoms 10mm deep under surface and the interface depth by quantifying the SAW dispersion.