A Robust Pipeline Including Directional Filtering and Wave Propagation Zones for Mapping Shear Wave Velocity

Shear Wave Elastography (SWE) allows for the extraction of the properties of biological tissue, such as the elastic modulus, through the characterization of propagating shear waves (SWs). This work presents a pipeline to construct robust Shear Wave Velocity (SWV) maps of heterogeneous tissues from Acoustic Radiation Force Impulse (ARFI)-based SWE by minimizing the effects of noise, reflections, and push beam artifacts. The pipeline was applied to experimental data from the IEEE UFFC-JS 2024 Challenge, entitled ‘algorithms for mapping elastic modulus (a-MEM)’, and it ranked first in the ARFI category.