Current working project title: Development of super-resolution ultrasound imaging for tumour characterisation.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This research project will investigate the clinical use of a high-performance imaging modality called Super Resolution Ultrasound (referred to as SRUS throughout this report) and its ability to probe micro-scale tissue morphology to characterise tumours. The fundamental question we will be trying to answer is 'What beneficial information can super-resolution ultrasound images provide to clinical staff during diagnosing, monitoring and treating particular diseases?'. Currently, the project's intended scope is to focus on tumour characterisation, as there have been several publications documenting potential links between the morphology of a tumour's microvasculature tissue and its disease severity. Additionally, there is evidence that other types of conditions could be studied by analysing the microvascular structure of particular tissues; micro-structures within the tongue potentially could reveal information about a patient's sepsis, and the project scope could be expanded at a later date to investigate this. Existing clinical procedures in the UK healthcare system, the widely available equipment and how well SRUS fits into the clinical workflow will all have to be considered in this research, and the methodology of the project will reflect these considerations. Initially, the project has been focused on using ultrasound phantoms and assessing the performance of the equipment and processing algorithms for producing SRUS images. Thereafter, the proposed methodology will focus on analysing existing clinical data sets as well as collecting more clinical data to better understand the information that can be extracted about tissue morphology, and attempting to develop a method of quantifying and comparing different tumour microstructures using existing histology analysis as a ground truth indicator.