Real‐time tissue elasticity system—Development and clinical application

The progress of recent semiconductor technology has a remarkable thing. Thanks to progress of this semiconductor technology, the ultrasound scanner in medicine could come to hold enormousness computing power and has come to realize various complicated processing. At the same time, hardness of human tissue which, as you know, is used by palpation is already the information that is important in a diagnosis. But, we think that it does not have enough objectivity. To increase objectivity by visualizing hardness of tissue, we adopted ECAM (extended combined autocorrelation method), which was developed by Professor Shiina at Tsukuba University in Japan, and succeeded in developing the commercial ultrasound scanner, which could display a strain image in real time. From a clinical point of view, in the breast region, mammography examination is effective in a diagnosis, but a judgment of permeation degree is not superior in ultrasound image. And in a thyroid gland region, we begin to get experience with availabili...