Completed Research
The following is a list of recently completed research projects in the Ultrasound Research Laboratory, Laboratory for Enabling Technologies for Medical Ultrasound.
Injury-mimicking Ultrasound Phantoms
Injury mimicking ultrasound phantoms are training devices that can emulate pre- and post-injury conditions at specific regions of human anatomy. As such, they are likely to be useful tools for teaching medical personnel how to recognize trauma conditions from ultrasound images. Due to the increased use of portable ultrasound systems, earlier diagnosis of internal trauma will be feasible at locations such as traffic accidents, earthquakes, battlefields and terrorist attacks.
Freehand 3D Ultrasound Imaging System with Position Tracking
The research, carried out by Carsten Poulsen, then an MS student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, developed a new and compact type of optical registration system, which tracks the position of the transducer on the skin surface. This is done continuously by acquiring images of the skin at the transducer location with a CCD-array, attached on the side of the transducer. With this position information, a sequence of 2D ultrasound frames, obtained with freehand scanning and thus likely to have unequal spacing and varying lateral position, is interpolated into a sequence of ultrasound frames with equal spacing and fixed lateral position. The implementation uses the Terason ultrasound scanner [1] and Sonocubic 3D software, operating in Windows XP.
Optical Imaging of Condensing Fluid Films
This research deals with analysis of condensing fluid films in low gravity using optical interferometry, and was carried out by then MS student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Deepti Tulsiani. An ultrasound based measurement system has been developed as part of the above project. The ultrasonic technique gives a quantitative measure of the condensation film thickness, but only at the locations of the ultrasound transducer. Inclusion of an interferometric system for imaging the condensation layer would enable extraction of valuable data from the image because of the ability of the optical system to image the perturbations in the condensation films.
First Generation Portable Ultrasound Scanner
This research was the first effort towards the development of a portable ultrasound scanner system for field-use, and the work was carried out by by then MS student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Dalys Sebastian. The challenge lies in the implementation of an efficient voice interface for controlling the scanner system especially under high noise environments and in addition, integration of the scanner with light-weight wearable computer systems and visual displays to make it suitable for field use.
This portable ultrasound system was targeted for military use, and for civilian use in disaster and rescue, ambulance and helicopter transport and rural health.
Modeling and Quantitative Ultrasound
The applications of an ultrasound pulse-echo system range from the reliable detection of critical flaws in manufactured parts, to identification of the surface topology of organs or tissues, to object recognition in an ocean environment. The energy optimization method, carried out by then MS student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aditya Nadkarni, is used to improve the ability of a pulse-echo system to quantify specific aspects of a reflecting structure or to identify a given reflector geometry.
Arterial Plaque Classification
The goal of this research is to develop and evaluate a non-invasive ultrasound-based technique for in vivo classification of atherosclerotic plaque. The work was carried out by then MS student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ruben Lara-Montalvo. The ultimate goal is to develop a screening tool for stroke risk. The technique measures the absolute integrated backscatter (IBS) of arterial wall structures through an intervening inhomogeneous soft tissue layer. The aberrating effect of this tissue layer is minimized by normalizing the measured IBS from the wall region of interest with the IBS from an adjacent range cell in blood.
Maintained by webmaster@wpi.eduLast modified: March 12, 2008 14:43:03