Ultrasound Guidance and Display

超声波是最常见的医学图像，最近超过了x射线。即时护理是超声领域增长最快的领域，尤其是麻醉学领域。这种增长是由超声的几个趋势驱动的：小型化、成本降低和通用硬件上先进的数字图像处理。一个典型的使用案例是用超声波瞄准周围神经，然后将针引导到目标并注射麻醉。限制进一步发展的问题是图像质量仍然经常不足，并且护理点操作员是新手/未经超声培训。操作人员仍然在努力进行手眼协调，以便根据床边监视器上经常有噪声的图像引导针头到达患者体内的目标。我们需要的是在图像质量和特定临床应用的易用性方面取得重大飞跃。这样的飞跃不仅有利于医疗点的应用，而且从长远来看，最终可以向社区办公室的初级保健医生打开超声波市场。初级保健医生占所有医生的三分之一，占所有办公室就诊的51%，但由于这些问题，没有广泛使用超声波。该基金将开发改善2D和3D图像质量的方法，并通过将关键信息直接投射到患者身上来提高易用性。

Ultrasound is the most common medical image, recently surpassing x-rays. Point-of-care is the fastest growing sector in ultrasound, especially anesthesiology. This growth is driven by several trends in ultrasound: miniaturization, cost-reduction, and advanced digital image processing on generic hardware. A typical use-case is to target a peripheral nerve with ultrasound, then guide a needle to that target and inject anesthesia. The problems limiting further growth are that the image quality is still often inadequate, and the point-of-care operators are novices/untrained in ultrasound. Operators still struggle with the hand-eye coordination needed to guide a needle to the target in the patient based on an often-noisy image on a bedside monitor. What is needed is a significant leap in image quality and ease-of-use for specific clinical applications. Such a leap would not only benefit point-of-care applications, but in the long term could finally open the ultrasound market to primary care physicians in neighbourhood offices. Primary care physicians comprise one third of all physicians and see 51% of all office visits, but do not widely use ultrasound due to these problems. This grant will develop methods to improve image quality in both 2D and 3D, and improve ease-of-use by projecting key information directly on the patient.