Researchers develop new medical imaging technique
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| Are new imaging approaches on the horizon? |
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY) are working to develop a new technique for medical imaging that is designed to determine the relative stiffness of soft tissue for diagnosing injury and disease.
"Relative stiffness imaging could be an important diagnostic tool for such things as finding a tumor in soft tissue or detecting tissue damage from a heart attack," said Joyce McLaughlin, director of the Center for Inverse Problems and the Ford Foundation professor of mathematical sciences at Rensselaer. "Our goal is to create images depicting tissue stiffness by computing the variations of shear wave speed in biological tissue."
McLaughlin said her research is inspired by the medical examination in which a doctor presses on the surface of the body to detect abnormal or stiff tissue underneath. McLaughlin, along with Rensselaer research scientists Dan Renzi and Jeong-Rock Yoon, analyzed data gathered from an ultrasound-based system, which was developed by Mathias Fink of Laboratoire Ondes et Acoustique, ESPCI, at the University Paris VII. The system measures the amplitude of shear waves as they pass through biological tissue. The research team recognized that the changes of the shape and position of the wave fronts as they pass through tissue would allow the researchers to create an image that could be used as a diagnostic tool.
According to McLaughlin, shear wave speed can more than double in abnormal or stiff tissue, and the high contrast helps to produce a high-quality image. The researchers first developed an algorithm to identify the location of the very front of the wave as it passes through the tissue. Using only this data, the team computes the shear wave speed at each section of tissue and produces an image of stiffness variations.
"We call what we have developed the Arrival Time Algorithm," McLaughlin said, "and the initial images we have created using this computation are very promising."
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