Measurement of Change in Wall Thickness of Cylindrical Shell at Multiple Frequencies Caused by Remote Actuation for Assessment of Regional Viscoelasticity of Arterial Wall

To characterize tissues in atherosclerotic plaque, we have developed a method, namely, the phased tracking method, for measuring the strain (change in wall thick-ness) and elasticity of the arterial wall. However, some types of tissue, such as lipids and blood clots, cannot be discriminated from each other based only on elasticity be-cause of the small difference in their elasticity. For more precise tissue characterization, we are at-tempting to measure the regional viscoelasticity. To ob-tain the viscoelastic property, in this paper, elastic moduli at multiple frequencies were obtained by generating the change in internal pressure due to remote cyclic actua-tion. 1