Ultrasound is set to be an even more potent diagnostic tool for liver illness, cancer, and other diseases, owing to new technology developed at the University of Rochester.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has just granted four patents for diagnostic ultrasound technology created by Kevin Parker, William F. May and his doctorate students.
Parker stated that several of the innovations have already been licensed by start-ups aiming to utilize the advancements in clinics for the benefit of all patients.
Enhanced Imaging for Cancer and Liver Disease
Many disorders, including some malignant malignancies, can still be hidden or masked in medical imaging. Crystal clear images are required in many scenarios, yet occasionally getting clear images can be challenging.
Therefore, to discover the hidden patterns from ultrasound data that might point to issues with organs like the liver, thyroid, or breast, they applied sophisticated physics, arithmetic, and scattering theory.
How Color-Coding and Elastography Redefine Diagnostic Accuracy
Two of the patents are related to the H-scan technique developed in Parker’s lab and the other two focus on reverberant shear wave fields.
H-scan takes a standard black-and-white ultrasound image and attributes colors to features—for example, coding fat accumulating in the liver as yellow or cancer appearing in the breast as red.
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The technologies related to reverberant shear wave fields provide new capabilities for elastography—detecting the stiffness of tissue. “Many pathologies change the tissue properties including stiffness,” says Parker.
“If your liver is getting stiff it’s probably bad, if your brain is getting stiff, it’s not good, and many cancers show up as stiff lesions.”
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Parker says the technologies offer cheaper, faster, and better ways of getting the information to doctors and radiologists. Since his inventions focus on ultrasound image processing, they can be easily retrofitted to existing ultrasound equipment and do not require new hardware.
“These are inventions that you can retrofit to existing imaging systems. You can reprogram the scanners to process our way and out comes this new analysis and information,” says Parker. “We don’t have to recreate a whole new generation of ultrasound scanners.”
Reference:
- Patented ultrasound technologies improve diagnosis for cancer and other diseases
– (https:www.rochester.edu/newscenter/patented-ultrasound-technologies-improve-diagnosis-for-cancer-and-other-diseases-619622/)
Source-Eurekalert
