Four patents for ultrasound technologies that may better diagnose cancer and other diseases were recently issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Some of the technologies are already licensed to startup companies.
"Many ultrasound researchers like me are intrigued by this modality because ultrasound can be very inexpensive, portable, and has a variety of interactions with living tissue that have only recently been uncovered," Kevin Parker, the developer of the technologies and professor at the University of Rochester, told HCB News. "The age of quantitative measurements of ultrasound-tissue interactions is only recently becoming a clinical reality."
He explained that many diseases can still remain undetected by current medical imaging technology. He and his doctoral students leveraged advanced physics, math, and scattering theory to extract hidden features from ultrasound data that could reveal problems with organs including the liver, thyroid, and breast.
Two of the patents use a technique developed by Parker called the H-scan technique, which takes a standard black-and-white ultrasound image and uses color to highlight certain features. For instance, cancer in the breast shows up as red and fat accumulating in the liver is yellow.
The other technologies are based on reverberant shear wave fields, allowing them to determine the stiffness of tissue, which is a hallmark of many diseases.
When asked what benefits these new ultrasound technologies can offer clinicians aside from enhancing image clarity, Parker pointed to the common diagnostic measures of sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and related measures of how well a technique can detect and diagnose a pathology.
"Improving these measures is a major goal across all imaging modalities including ultrasound, and in the clinic this means the radiologist can see the pathology more clearly and be more confident about the need for follow up or not," he added.
He also believes that these technologies offer a cheaper and faster way of getting information to radiologists and other doctors. They can be retrofitted to existing ultrasound systems and don't require any additional hardwiring.
