This award will support collaborative research between Professor J. Ophir of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and Dr. D.E. Robinson of the Commonwealth Department of Health, Sydney, Australia. The investigators will develop techniques for estimating the speed of sound in living bodies, particularly in the human liver, and will join, in this work, the independent efforts that have been under way for some time in Houston and in Sydney. The collaboration will involve the sharing of knowledge derived from simulations, and phantom and in vitro tissue studies at the University of Texas; and of information obtained from clinical results in Sydney. The U.S. investigators will benefit from the experience of their Australian counterparts in the implementation of clinical apparatus, and the Australians will in turn benefit from the experience of the U.S. investigators with a complementary beam tracking measurement method. This study could advance the ability to diagnose liver disease, and certain other organic diseases, using ultrasound.
