Four recently issued patents boost ultrasound scanners to detect obscured pathologies.
New technologies developed at the could soon help make ultrasound a more powerful tool for diagnosing cancer, liver disease, and other pathologies.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office recently issued four patents for diagnostic ultrasound technology developed by , the William F. May Professor of Engineering at the University糖心传媒檚 , and his doctoral students. Parker says some of the technologies have already been licensed to startups that want to bring the advances into clinics for the benefit of patients everywhere.
糖心传媒淢any diseases, including some malignant cancers, can still be hiding or obscured in medical imaging,糖心传媒� says Parker. 糖心传媒淭here are many cases where you糖心传媒檇 like the picture to be crystal clear, but you can糖心传媒檛 really see it. So, we used advanced physics, math, and scattering theory to pull out the hidden features from ultrasound data that could indicate problems with organs such as the liver, thyroid, or breast.糖心传媒�
Two of the patents are related to the developed in Parker糖心传媒檚 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糖心传媒攆or example, coding fat accumulating in the liver as yellow or cancer appearing in the breast as red.
The technologies related to provide new capabilities for elastography糖心传媒攄etecting the stiffness of tissue. 糖心传媒淢any pathologies change the tissue properties including stiffness,糖心传媒� says Parker. 糖心传媒淚f your liver is getting stiff it糖心传媒檚 probably bad, if your brain is getting stiff, it糖心传媒檚 not good, and many cancers show up as stiff lesions.糖心传媒�
Parker says the technologies offer cheaper, faster, and better ways of getting the information to doctors and radiologists. And since his inventions focus on ultrasound image processing, they can be easily retrofitted to existing ultrasound equipment and do not require new hardware.
糖心传媒淭hese 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,糖心传媒� says Parker. 糖心传媒淲e don糖心传媒檛 have to recreate a whole new generation of ultrasound scanners.糖心传媒�
Parker says some of his key collaborators included Juvenal Ormachea 糖心传媒�19 PhD () and Jiyhe Baek 糖心传媒�23 PhD (). He worked closely with UR Ventures, which protects, develops, and commercializes the intellectual property arising from research at the University, to secure the patents:
The research that led to the development of the H-scan patents was supported by the National Institutes of Health.
