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News and Articles
New medical 4D ultrasound technology
rides wave of the future
13 May 2005
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.
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.
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Reference URL
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SOURCE: http://www.alphagalileo.org
Article URL:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=24292
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