Effect of SNR on Quantitative Viscoelastic Response (QVisR) Ultrasound in silico

Quantitative Viscoelastic Response (QVisR) ultrasound uses in silico on-axis VisR displacement profiles to estimate the elastic and viscous moduli of an interrogated material. This work studies the effect of varying the radio frequency (RF) data signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on QVisR's estimates. White Gaussian noise was added to the RF data of simulated viscoelastic materials subject to a VisR beamsequence with SNRs from 0-50dB in steps of 10dB. Tracked displacements were used as features for a neural network model to estimate elastic and viscous moduli. Predicted elastic moduli RMSE was smaller than the simulated material elastic step size down to 20dB SNR and viscous moduli RMSE was smaller than the viscous step size down to 40dB SNR. These findings suggest QVisR can be used to estimate viscoelastic moduli in noisy environments that more closely model non-simulation data acquisitions.