PFI-TT: High-Resolution Medical Imaging using Ultrasound

这一创新伙伴关系-技术转化项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是，通过开发一种能够进行类似核磁共振成像的高质量扫描的基于超声波的设备，促进更好的医疗筛查和诊断，特别是乳腺癌检测。与标准的2D/3D乳房x光检查相比，该设备减少了假阴性和50%以上的假阳性，仅在美国，该设备每年就可以避免80万例不必要的活检和780万例不必要的后续乳房扫描。这意味着医疗保健支出每年总共减少35亿美元。在商业上，该设备预计比现有方法具有多种竞争优势，具有更大的舒适性和更安全的检查条件，同时提供更好的诊断能力，并将影响全球乳房成像设备市场，估计为25.6亿美元，其中55%的市场集中在美国。最后，这项技术在许多其他有益的医学成像应用方面具有巨大的潜力，如儿科、前列腺癌检测、肌肉骨骼成像和脑成像。对于这些应用，进一步评估定量超声的临床效益是至关重要的，这将大大促进该设备的发展。该项目旨在开发一种无压缩、无辐射、基于超声的医学成像设备。传统的手持式超声（HHUS）或自动乳腺超声（ABUS）设备丢弃了绝大多数超声数据，而该设备旨在利用完整的数据内容。该技术有望重建高精度图像，其分辨率可与基于3D全物理地震“全波形反演”方法获得的MRI相媲美。本项目将使用真实超声数据演示这种高分辨率成像方法。到目前为止，这只是通过模拟超声数据来证明的。挑战包括超声探头的设计和表征，以及超声数据质量的最大化。与传统超声不同，所提出的方法需要探针辐射模式的彻底表征。表征将通过对已知介质（例如水）中透射超声波场的精确水听器测量来实现。测量结果与全物理数值模拟进行了比较；当获得良好的拟合时，将确定源辐射方向图。对发射信号进行微调和仔细选择将有助于降低噪声水平。由此产生的高质量数据将在小物体上进行图像重建测试。这些多重活动将在获得高质量测量方面发挥关键作用-实现高分辨率，全物理，定量超声成像。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation – Technology Translation (PFI-TT) project is to facilitate better medical screening and diagnostics, in particular for breast cancer detection, by developing an ultrasound-based device capable of MRI-like and quality scans. With a reduction in false negatives and 50% or more in false positives compared with standard 2D/3D screening mammograms, this device could avoid 800,000 unnecessary biopsies and 7.8 million unnecessary follow-up breast scans per year in the USA alone. This represents an overall $3.5 billion per year reduction in healthcare expenditure. Commercially, this device is expected to have multiple competitive advantages over existing methods, with greater comfort and safer exam conditions while providing better diagnostic capabilities and will impact the breast imaging device market, estimated to be $2.56 billion globally, with 55% of this market concentrated in the USA. Finally, this technology has significant potential for many other beneficial medical imaging applications, such as pediatrics, prostate cancer detection, musculoskeletal imaging, and brain imaging. For these applications, further assessing the clinical benefits of quantitative ultrasound is crucial, which will be greatly facilitated by the development of this device. The proposed project works toward developing a compression-free, radiation-free, and ultrasound-based imaging device for medical imaging. While conventional hand-held ultrasound (HHUS) or automated breast ultrasound (ABUS) devices discard the vast majority of ultrasound data, the device is designed to exploit the full data content. This is expected to enable reconstruction of highly accurate images with exceptional resolution, comparable to MRI, obtained based on 3D full-physics seismic “full waveform inversion” methods. This project will demonstrate this high-resolution imaging method using real ultrasound data. To date, this has only been demonstrated using simulated ultrasound data. Challenges include ultrasound probe design and characterization, and maximization of ultrasound data quality. Unlike conventional ultrasound, the proposed method necessitates a thorough characterization of probe radiation patterns. Characterization will be achieved with accurate hydrophone measurements of transmitted ultrasound wavefields in known media (e.g., water). Measurements are compared to full-physics numerical simulations; the source radiation pattern will be determined when a good fit is obtained. Fine tuning and careful selection of the emitted signal will help reduce noise levels. The resulting high-quality data will be tested with image reconstructions on small objects. These multiple activities will play a critical role in obtaining high quality measurements— enabling high resolution, full-physics, quantitative ultrasound imaging.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.