December 9, 2014 — GE Healthcare announced U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance for a new software enhancement for its Logiq E9 ultrasound system, called Shear Wave elastography, at the 2014 annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). The tool instantaneously generates a precise, quantifiable measure of tissue stiffness, providing clinicians with accurate and consistent data that can be used to identify underlying disease, while performing an abdominal ultrasound exam.
Stiff tissue found during routine physical exams can be an early indication of disease, including liver fibrosis. By taking a quantifiable measure of tissue stiffness, clinicians can assess disease in the liver, breast and other organs immediately.
Previous strain elastography technology required clinicians to manually palpate a patient to identify stiff tissue and produced a measure of stiffness relative only to other tissue within the same patient’s body. Shear Wave elastography uses acoustic energy from the ultrasound transducer to automatically and instantaneously produce a numeric measure of stiffness on an absolute scale.
The technology measures the speed of the shear waves as they travel through tissue in the body. It instantly and continuously displays the results on a 2-D real-time, color-coded ultrasound image, with a low speed corresponding to softer tissue and a high speed corresponding to stiffer tissue.
“Being able to instantaneously view a color-coded ultrasound image with numeric results for tissue stiffness during patient exams means more efficiency in how we assess and manage patients’ disease,” said John McGahan, M.D., a Sacramento-based interventional and diagnostic radiologist. “It also offers a less invasive method of staging liver fibrosis for the patient, which should give both clinicians and patients more confidence in the results.”
For more information: www.gehealthcare.com
May 16, 2025 
