Scanning the Body with ultrasound tomography

Good news!

"... To scan an organ from all sides, UST requires the entire body part to be in contact with water. As a way of demonstrating the feasibility of their new, larger system, ... team drew inspiration from an early ultrasound system from the 1950s, in which patients were submerged in a tank of water. ..."

From the abstract:

"Ultrasonography is a vital component of modern clinical care, with handheld probes routinely used for diagnostic imaging and procedural guidance. However, handheld ultrasound imaging is limited by factors such as the partial cross-sectional field of view, operator dependency, contact-induced distortion and lack of transmission contrast.

Here we demonstrate a new system that enables whole cross-sectional ultrasound tomography of humans in both reflection and transmission modes. We generate two-dimensional images of the entire in vivo human cross-section in the abdomen and thighs with uniform in-plane resolution using a custom 512-element circular ultrasound receiver array and a rotating transmitter.

Sequential scans with our system show strong agreement with clinical magnetic resonance imaging counterparts.

To address unmet clinical needs, we explore two key applications.

First, we observe abdominal adipose distributions in our images, enabling adipose thickness assessment without ionising radiation or mechanical deformation. Second, we demonstrate an approach for video-rate biopsy needle localization with respect to internal tissue features.

These capabilities make whole cross-sectional ultrasound tomography a potential practical tool for clinical needs currently unmet by other modalities."

Scanning the Body with Sound - www.caltech.edu "Ultrasounds are a critical part of modern health care, helping to image soft tissue and organs, measure blood flow, and monitor fetal development. But the technique has constraints, including a limited field of view and the potential for operator error. To address current shortfalls and push the technology toward new applications, ... researchers have developed a system that can perform ultrasound tomography (UST) imaging on whole cross-sections of the body."

Whole cross-sectional human ultrasound tomography (no public access)

Whole Cross-Sectional Human Ultrasound Tomography (preprint, open access, first published 6/30/2023)

At left, an illustration of the ultrasound tomography (UST) system  ... While a patient is submerged in a water tank, a lab-made ring-like structure made up of 512 transducers is used to scan up and down the body and image different cross-sections.

At right, UST images of a human abdomen show how information is gathered from different types of measurements to produce images of organs and tissues inside the body.

Images of a healthy female's abdomen taken by the Wang lab's ultrasound tomography system (left) are compared to clinical MRI images of a corresponding region (right).