The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation ? Technology Translation (PFI-TT) project is to facilitate better medical screening and diagnostics, in particular for breast cancer detection, by developing an ultrasound-based device capable of MRI-like and quality scans. With a reduction in false negatives and 50% or more in false positives compared with standard 2D/3D screening mammograms, this device could avoid 800,000 unnecessary biopsies and 7.8 million unnecessary follow-up breast scans per year in the USA alone. This represents an overall $3.5 billion per year reduction in healthcare expenditure. Commercially, this device is expected to have multiple competitive advantages over existing methods, with greater comfort and safer exam conditions while providing better diagnostic capabilities and will impact the breast imaging device market, estimated to be $2.56 billion globally, with 55% of this market concentrated in the USA. Finally, this technology has significant potential for many other beneficial medical imaging applications, such as pediatrics, prostate cancer detection, musculoskeletal imaging, and brain imaging. For these applications, further assessing the clinical benefits of quantitative ultrasound is crucial, which will be greatly facilitated by the development of this device.
The proposed project works toward developing a compression-free, radiation-free, and ultrasound-based imaging device for medical imaging. While conventional hand-held ultrasound (HHUS) or automated breast ultrasound (ABUS) devices discard the vast majority of ultrasound data, the device is designed to exploit the full data content. This is expected to enable reconstruction of highly accurate images with exceptional resolution, comparable to MRI, obtained based on 3D full-physics seismic ?full waveform inversion? methods. This project will demonstrate this high-resolution imaging method using real ultrasound data. To date, this has only been demonstrated using simulated ultrasound data. Challenges include ultrasound probe design and characterization, and maximization of ultrasound data quality. Unlike conventional ultrasound, the proposed method necessitates a thorough characterization of probe radiation patterns. Characterization will be achieved with accurate hydrophone measurements of transmitted ultrasound wavefields in known media (e.g., water). Measurements are compared to full-physics numerical simulations; the source radiation pattern will be determined when a good fit is obtained. Fine tuning and careful selection of the emitted signal will help reduce noise levels. The resulting high-quality data will be tested with image reconstructions on small objects. These multiple activities will play a critical role in obtaining high quality measurements? enabling high resolution, full-physics, quantitative ultrasound imaging.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
