A portable ultrasound system could make reliable breast imaging more accessible and available for home use

Good news! Cancer is history (soon)!

Again the ideologues and demagogues at MIT demean women  as "people"!!! Horrible!

"For people [women] at high risk of developing breast cancer, yearly mammograms may not be enough to detect tumors early. To make earlier diagnosis easier, an MIT team has developed portable detectors based on ultrasound, which could be used much more frequently. ..."

From the abstract:

"Breast cancer screening and longitudinal monitoring require imaging technologies that are portable, operator-independent, and suitable for frequent use, a capability not fully met by mammography or conventional ultrasound.

We present a three-dimensional (3D) portable ultrasound system for real-time examination (3D PURE) that overcomes key limitations in volumetric breast imaging through advances in transducer design, acoustic materials, and adaptive beamforming.

A box-array design incorporating a corner-gap offset geometry suppresses peak crosstalk (by 3.73 dB at the corner-most element), prevents preamplifier saturation, and supports higher transmit voltages (up to 24 V).

A custom flowable backing layer (impedance 6.12 MRayl; attenuation 7.56 dB mm−1 MHz−1) integrates around fragile wirebonds, reduces inter-element crosstalk by ~4.5 dB throughout the array, and improves axial and lateral/elevational resolutions by ~200 µm and ~70 µm, respectively.

Layered Aberration-Correction Reconstruction (LACR), an adaptive 3D beamformer, compensates for heterogeneous speed-of-sound (SoS) in the breast, reducing depth localization error by 2 mm and aberration defocusing by 70 µm on average at a 5 cm depth.

Nine of the ten participants in an in vitro study showed improved microtarget detection efficiency with 3D PURE relative to a conventional 2D system (p = 0.0215), analogous to detection of microcalcifications.

These results, combined with in vivo imaging validation of various phenotypes, highlight the potential of 3D PURE for reliable breast imaging.

Furthermore, a vision-guided computer interface, MyFUS, ensures self-guided, user-friendly, and operator-independent probe positioning for longitudinal monitoring."

A portable ultrasound system could make reliable breast imaging more accessible | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology "The new technology, which generates high-resolution, 3D images of breast tissue, requires no expertise to operate and could be used at home."

Portable, real-time 3D ultrasound for operator-independent breast imaging (open access)

Portable, real-time 3D ultrasound for operator-independent breast imaging (contains link to PDF file)

Fig. 1: Overview of the 3D portable ultrasound for real-time examination (PURE) for portable and operator-independent monitoring.