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鈥檚 , 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.
鈥淢any diseases, including some malignant cancers, can still be hiding or obscured in medical imaging,鈥� says Parker. 鈥淭here are many cases where you鈥檇 like the picture to be crystal clear, but you can鈥檛 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.鈥�
Two of the patents are related to the developed in Parker鈥檚 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鈥攆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鈥攄etecting the stiffness of tissue. 鈥淢any pathologies change the tissue properties including stiffness,鈥� says Parker. 鈥淚f your liver is getting stiff it鈥檚 probably bad, if your brain is getting stiff, it鈥檚 not good, and many cancers show up as stiff lesions.鈥�
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.
鈥淭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,鈥� says Parker. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 have to recreate a whole new generation of ultrasound scanners.鈥�
Parker says some of his key collaborators included Juvenal Ormachea 鈥�19 PhD () and Jiyhe Baek 鈥�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.
