PFI-TT: High-Resolution Medical Imaging using Ultrasound

PFI-TT：使用超声波的高分辨率医学成像

• 批准号: 1941241
• 负责人: Jeroen Tromp
• 金额: $ 25万
• 依托单位: Princeton University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-05-01 至 2022-10-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1941241&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: PFI; TT; Resolution; Medical; Imaging

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.

这一创新-技术转化伙伴关系（PFI-TT）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MRI和高质量扫描的超声设备，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筛查乳房X线照片相比，该设备减少了假阴性和50%或更多的假阳性，仅在美国每年就可以避免80万次不必要的活检和780万次不必要的随访乳房扫描。这意味着医疗保健支出每年减少35亿加元。在商业上，该设备预计将比现有方法具有多个竞争优势，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，并将影响全球乳腺成像设备市场，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中具有巨大的潜力，例如儿科、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益处至关重要，该设备的开发将大大促进这一点。该项目致力于开发一种无压缩，无辐射和基于超声的医学成像设备。虽然传统的手持式超声（HHUS）或自动乳腺超声（ABUS）设备会丢弃绝大多数超声数据，但该设备旨在利用全部数据内容。预计这将使重建的高度准确的图像具有特殊的分辨率，相当于MRI，获得的基础上三维全物理地震“全波形反演”的方法。该项目将使用真实的超声数据演示这种高分辨率成像方法。到目前为止，这仅使用模拟超声数据证明。挑战包括超声探头设计和表征，以及超声数据质量的最大化。与传统的超声，所提出的方法需要一个彻底的表征探头辐射模式。将通过对已知介质（例如，水）。测量值进行比较，全物理数值模拟，源辐射模式将被确定时，得到一个很好的配合。对发射信号的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通过小物体的图像重建进行测试。这些多项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NSF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。