{"id":619622,"date":"2024-09-12T12:02:05","date_gmt":"2024-09-12T16:02:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=619622"},"modified":"2024-09-16T14:41:12","modified_gmt":"2024-09-16T18:41:12","slug":"patented-ultrasound-technologies-improve-diagnosis-for-cancer-and-other-diseases-619622","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/patented-ultrasound-technologies-improve-diagnosis-for-cancer-and-other-diseases-619622\/","title":{"rendered":"Patented ultrasound technologies improve diagnosis for cancer and other diseases"},"content":{"rendered":"

Four recently issued patents boost ultrasound scanners to detect obscured pathologies.<\/h2>\n

New technologies developed at the Ä¢¹½´«Ã½<\/a> could soon help make ultrasound a more powerful tool for diagnosing cancer, liver disease, and other pathologies.<\/p>\n

The United States Patent and Trademark Office recently issued four patents for diagnostic ultrasound technology developed by Kevin Parker<\/a>, the William F. May Professor of Engineering at the University\u2019s Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany diseases, including some malignant cancers, can still be hiding or obscured in medical imaging,\u201d says Parker. \u201cThere are many cases where you\u2019d like the picture to be crystal clear, but you can\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two of the patents are related to the H-scan technique<\/a> developed in Parker\u2019s lab and the other two focus on reverberant shear wave fields.<\/p>\n

H-scan takes a standard black-and-white ultrasound image and attributes colors to features\u2014for example, coding fat accumulating in the liver as yellow or cancer appearing in the breast as red.<\/p>\n

\"two
CLARITY WITH COLOR:<\/strong> An example of a conventional ultrasound B-scan showing a suspicious breast lesion (left image) and with the new H-scan analysis showing the possibly malignant mass in color (right image), where red colors indicate a high probability of malignancy. (Image courtesy of Jihye Baek)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The technologies related to reverberant shear wave fields<\/a> provide new capabilities for elastography\u2014detecting the stiffness of tissue. \u201cMany pathologies change the tissue properties including stiffness,\u201d says Parker. \u201cIf your liver is getting stiff it\u2019s probably bad, if your brain is getting stiff, it\u2019s not good, and many cancers show up as stiff lesions.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese 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,\u201d says Parker. \u201cWe don\u2019t have to recreate a whole new generation of ultrasound scanners.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parker says some of his key collaborators included Juvenal Ormachea \u201919 PhD (electrical and computer engineering<\/a>) and Jiyhe Baek \u201923 PhD (biomedical engineering<\/a>). He worked closely with UR Ventures<\/a>, which protects, develops, and commercializes the intellectual property arising from research at the University, to secure the patents:<\/p>\n