Cardiac muscle stiffness can potentially be estimated non-invasively with shear wave elastography. Shear waves are present on the septal wall after mitral and aortic valve closure, thus providing an opportunity to assess stiffness in early systole and early diastole. We report on the shear wave recordings of 22 minipigs with high-frame-rate echocardiography. The waves were captured with 4000 frames/s using a programmable commercial ultrasound machine. The wave pattern was extracted from the data through a local tissue velocity estimator based on one-lag autocorrelation. The wave propagation velocity was determined with a normalized Radon transform, resulting in median wave propagation velocities of 2.2 m/s after mitral valve closure and 4.2 m/s after aortic valve closure. Overall the velocities ranged between 0.8 and 6.3 m/s in a 95% confidence interval. By dispersion analysis we found that the propagation velocity only mildly increased with shear wave frequency.

This paper describes an in-vivo pilot study in which the systolic myocardial stiffness of four pigs was measured with various acoustic techniques. We compare the propagation velocity of shear waves in open chest and closed chest experiments, in which the open-chest shear wave was either physiologically induced by aortic valve closure (N=3), or externally induced by acoustic-radiation force (N=1). The results of closed-chest versus open-chest recordings are consistent within 1 unit of standard error, whereas the acoustic-radiation force measurement showed lowest standard deviation (7% versus 13%).