New Medical Ultrasound Technology Rides Wave of the Future
A fully digital 4D ultrasound system is set to provide a ‘next generation’ integrated solution for medical imaging applications, allowing practitioners to provide faster treatment and improve therapeutic success rates.
(PRWEB) May 14, 2005 -- Developed by ADUMS, an IST-funded project that ended
in April 2005, the advanced high-quality imaging system will significantly
reduce diagnostic time. In addition, the technology uses off-the-shelf computer
hardware, making it a much cheaper alternative to expensive, purpose-produced
ultrasound machines.
“The whole process of ultrasound devices has been
moved away from the traditional hardware and is now implemented in software,”
says Dr Georgios Sakas, ADUMS project coordinator. “The hardware of the device
creates mechanical waves and receives the echoes. Once the echoes are received,
they are converted in digital form and the rest of the processing is performed
by software.”
A 4D ultrasound takes multiple images in rapid succession,
creating a three-dimensional motion video, which is invaluable for diagnosis
purposes.
An important factor in ultrasound image processing is the
beamformer, the part of the system that provides the focusing for the ultrasound
beam.
Dr Stergios Stergiopoulos, president of the Canadian National
Medical Technologies, one of the project partners, maintains that even today’s
most advanced state-of- the-art medical ultrasound imaging systems suffer from
very poor image resolution.
“This is the result of the very small size of
deployed arrays of sensors and the distortion effects by the influence of the
human body’s non-linear propagation characteristics,” he says. “The ADUMS
project technology replaces the beamformer of the ultrasound systems with the
adaptive beamforming scheme that has been developed for the sonar array systems
of the Canadian Navy. The ADUMS project results demonstrated that the new
adaptive beamformer significantly improves, at very low cost, the image
resolution capabilities of the ultrasound imaging systems, which will result in
better diagnosis.”
Until now, every new generation of the hardware
component of ultrasound devices was, effectively, a complete redesign.
“On the other hand, ADUMS technology is based on a complete software
approach, using off-the-shelf PC components,” explains Dr Sakas. “Thus, a
redesign from scratch will not be necessary and future improvements can be made
by extensions of existing software.”
The portability and the low cost of
the 4D ultrasound systems allow medical practitioners and family physicians to
have ready access to diagnostic imaging systems on a daily basis and will make a
valuable contribution in the field of preventive medicine, adds Dr
Stergiopoulos.
Consortium partners are currently using the new technology
for their businesses and are promoting it to other organisations that use
ultrasound technology.
Contact:
Dr Georgios Sakas
Head of Cognitive
Computing & Medical Imaging department
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer
Graphics (IGD)
Fraunhoferstr. 5
D-64283 Darmstadt
Germany
Tel:
+49-6151-155153
Fax: +49-6151-155-445
Email: e-mail protected from spam
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/5/prweb239759.htm