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Abstract: Tissue elasticity contains important informationfor physicians in diagnosis and treatment, and, e.g., can help intumor detection because tumors are stiffer than healthy tissue.Ultrasound shear wave elastography imaging (US-SWEI) canbe used to estimate tissue stiffness by measuring the velocityof induced shear waves. Commonly, a linear US probe is usedto track shear waves at a high imaging frequency in 2D. Real-time US-SWEI is limited by the required time for data process-ing. Hence, reducing the imaging field of view (FOV) is ben-eficial as it decreases the size of the acquired data and therebythe acquisition, transfer and processing time. However, a de-crease in the FOV has the disadvantage that shear waves aretracked over a smaller distance and thus, also fewer samplingpoints are available for velocity estimation. This trade-off be-tween a smaller FOV and thus, a smaller data size, and theaccuracy of shear wave velocity estimation is investigated inthis work. For this purpose, shear waves were tracked with alinear US probe in gelatin phantoms with four different stiff-ness values. During data processing, we reduced the FOV vir-tually from38.1 mmto2.1 mm. It was found that a reductionof the FOV to4.5 mmleads to an overestimation of up to fivetimes larger shear wave velocities but still allows to distinguishbetween phantoms of different stiffness. However, not all esti-mated velocity values could be clearly assigned to the correctstiffness value. The smallest studied FOV of2.1 mmwas notsufficient for distinguishing between the phantoms anymore