Virtual Touch Elastography Imaging Allows Visualization of Deep Body Tissue Better

Virtual Touch ultrasound elastrography imaging is a completely new way of visualizing tissue stiffness, allowing clinicians to visualize pathology deeper into the body and more precisely than ever before.

Using sound beams to gently compress tissue, Virtual Touch imaging displays a map, an elastogram, of comparative tissue stiffness within the region of interest. This elastogram provides clinicians with more diverse clinical information and increases diagnostic confidence, improving clinical decision-making for more efficient patient care. Virtual Touch imaging is available on Siemens’ AcusonS2000 and Acuson S3000 ultrasound systems.

Siemens Healthcare (Erlangen, Germany) has reported that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared the company’s Virtual Touch imaging ultrasound application—Siemens’ first commercially available implementation of acoustic radiation force impulse (ARFI) technology.

Virtual Touch imaging lessens the dependence on user expertise, improving interoperator reproducibility—a significant feature of clinical utility. Precisely targeting the ultrasound beam within the region of interest, Virtual Touch imaging maximizes sensitivity to create a more uniform elastogram. By comparison, existing manual compression techniques apply pressure merely at the skin surface, with uncontrollable stress applied in deeper tissues.

Virtual Touch imaging is FDA-cleared for use in thyroid, abdominal, breast, small parts, and musculoskeletal exams. The technology has been commercially available since 2008 in Europe and in Asia, where it has been validate to be a very beneficial application in the detection, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up of cancer, chronic liver disease, and musculoskeletal degeneration, and injury. The technology features an excellent sensitivity to extremely small tissue displacements, which leads to enhanced border definition and improved depiction of lesion size. This sensitivity also helps enable clinicians to identify the stiffest portion of the tissue to enhance targeting of fine-needle aspiration (FNA) and biopsy sampling.

“Siemens is proud to announce the FDA clearance of Virtual Touch imaging technology,” said Jeffrey Bundy, CEO, Siemens Healthcare ultrasound business unit. “Armed with this powerful visualization tool, clinicians in the United States can now more confidently assess lesion tissue stiffness, further enhancing their diagnostic confidence.”

Virtual Touch imaging is gaining international clinical acceptance, evolving into a new protocol of care at an increasing number of institutions. “Virtual Touch imaging enables the user to avoid the limitations of compression elastography, compressing tissue without any user dependency to provide a higher-quality display of the lesion,” said Dirk-Andre Clevert, section head of the Interdisciplinary Ultrasound Center at University Hospital Munich-Grosshadern (Germany), which employs ultrasound elastography imaging to examine many of the approximately 20,000 patients who are treated annually at the center.

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