Next-Generation 4D Ultrasound

Furthermore, the technology utilizes off-the-shelf computer hardware, making it a much more inexpensive alternative to costly, specialized ultrasound systems.

"The whole process of ultrasound devices has been moved away from the traditional hardware and is now implemented in software,” remarked Dr. Georgios Sakas, project coordinator, ADUMS. "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 system captures many images in rapid succession, generating a 3D motion video, which is beneficial for diagnostic purposes. A significant factor in the image processing is the beamformer, the part of the system that provides the focusing for the ultrasound beam. Dr. Stergios Stergiopoulos, president of Canadian National Medical Technologies, one of the project's partners, argues that even today's most sophisticated ultrasound 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 nonlinear propagation characteristics,” Dr. Stergiopoulos stated. "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.”




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