Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras have developed a new technology that can provide a clear and high-quality view through a reconstructed ultrasound image. The research could facilitate better diagnosis of diseases, detection of subtle abnormalities, and improved real-time image-guided biopsy procedures and treatment monitoring applications. Ultrasound imaging technology is used to capture real-time images of the inside of the human body.
The team claims to have developed a new beamforming technique, which is demonstrated to outperform other existing techniques and produce the best image resolution across the field. The findings of their research have been published in Scientific Reports, a peer-reviewed journal. Delay and Sum (DAS) is the most commonly used ultrasound imaging technology in commercial systems due to the simplicity of beamformer hardware implementation.
It has a wide range of clinical applications in the diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions. The technique is widely used to diagnose the cause of pain, inflammation and infection in internal organs and to examine the fetus in pregnant women. The main component of an ultrasound machine is a “beamformer”, which plays a major role in the final reconstructed image quality. Over the years, several techniques have been identified to improve the quality of the reconstructed image by replacing the beamformer.
This research could potentially facilitate many applications such as early detection and better diagnosis of diseases, detection of minute abnormalities within the human body such as kidney stones, improved real-time image-guided biopsy procedures and treatment monitoring. App, Professor, Department of Applied Mechanics, IIT Madras, told the media.
We have developed a new technology called F-DOWMAS:
These drawbacks make it challenging to detect small changes in the underlying tissue from the captured image, which may otherwise aid in early diagnosis of disease. Therefore, we have developed a new technique called Filtered Delay Optimally-weighted Multiplicity and Sum (F-DowMAS), which will provide higher quality images than existing techniques.”
However, its image resolution is low. Recently, with advances in computational capability, an alternative beamformer based on the Filtered Delay Multiple and Sum (F-DMAS) technology was introduced to compensate for the shortcomings of DAS. Based on this, many similar technologies are being developed in research labs around the world.
These enhancements will help clinicians to notice subtle changes in anatomy, leading to early and better diagnosis of diseases. Also, the developed technology can be easily integrated into existing commercial ultrasound scanner platforms without any additional hardware changes can be integrated, which makes it an economical and viable solution, – he said.
