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Clinical diagnostic imaging modalities of breast cancer are still having certain limitations such as low sensitivity in dense breast in mammography and low specificity of the B-mode ultrasound [1, 2]. Photoacoustic (PA) imaging has been introduced as an enabling tool to acquire important functional information of the pathologic tissues as well as molecular imaging of cancer when it is augmented with...
Although 3D ultrasound plays an increasingly important role, 2D echocardiography remains the main clinical imaging modality for cardiac function assessment in daily practice. This requires precise delineation of the myocardium at end diastole (ED) and systole (ES). Because of intrinsic high variability in image quality, manual interactions are still needed. In this study, we investigate a machine...
Carotid plaque rupture is a primary cause of ischemic strokes and transient ischemic attacks (TIAs). Probability of stroke and TIAs depend on the mechanical stability of plaque. Ultrasound strain can provide a non-invasive assessment of plaque stiffness to assess mechanical stability. We report on ultrasound strain indices from multiple regions of interest (ROI) in plaque as biomarkers for plaque...
Over the last decade, clinical studies show a strong interest for real-time 3D imaging. This calls for ultrasound probes with high-element-count 2D matrix transducer array, interfaced to an imaging system using an in-probe Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) that takes care of element selection, signal amplification, sub-array beamforming, etc. Since the ASIC is based on silicon and is...
Atherosclerosis in the carotid artery (CA) elevates the risk for cerebral events. Strain imaging has demonstrated to be a technique capable of identifying plaque composition. For strain imaging of carotid cross-sections, compound techniques have been developed to solve the poor strain estimation quality perpendicular to the ultrasound beam direction. This study assesses the performance of radial and...
Partial substitution of Al by Sc in AlN wurtzite films leads to a strong enhancement of the piezoelectric properties as long as the wurtzite phase is maintained. This is very promising for improving piezoelectric MEMS devices and enlarging their application range. Nucleation of (0001)-AlScN works particularly well on Pt (111) thin films. However, in some applications, the growth on insulating substrates...
Measuring broadband signals demands complex calibration of a detector over a sufficient bandwidth. For inertial cavitation emissions, the shock waves will be convolved with the transfer function of the hydrophone, and introduce artefacts to the measurement. Use of appropriately calibrated detectors would thus facilitate meaningful comparison of the cavitation emission data reported from groups using...
Investigating biomechanical properties of the cornea can have many clinical applications, including the diagnosis of keratoconus and post-refractive keratectasia. However, ascertaining the biomechanical properties of cornea remains a challenge because of the low resolution of currently available modalities cannot provide a point-to-point stiffness mapping of cornea. In this study, we reported a high-resolution...
In the last decade the number of beamforming methods has exploded. Many innovative ideas have been proposed, but we lack the tools to compare the different techniques efficiently. The PICMUS challenge (IUS 2016, Tours) was a pioneering step that made clear that two things are required to establish a fair comparison: a common data format, and a body of methods to process that data.
Histotripsy uses high-pressure, microsecond-length pulses to generate cavitation microbubbles to fractionate targeted tissue. After the collapse of a cavitation cloud, remnant microbubbles can persist for a second or longer before passively dissolving. These bubbles can act as seed nuclei for subsequent cavitation events reducing treatment efficiency because the nuclei are not well distributed through...
Histotripsy is considered a non-invasive therapeutic modality capable of mechanically fractionating tissue using cavitation bubbles induced by high intensity focused ultrasound pulses. Histotripsy-induced cavitation region over relatively large focal volume is effective in treating sizable lesion, while compromising its treatment precision. We demonstrate high-precision cavitation treatment using...
Patients with a 70–99% stenosed carotid artery will undergo surgery to prevent rupture of the plaque. However, the degree of stenosis does not determine the vulnerability of the plaque, since vulnerability depends on the plaque's morphology, mechanical properties and the force acting on the plaque. Mechanical models of the carotid artery can improve decision-making of the surgeon by quantifying and...
Energy harvesting from surrounding electromagnetic wave can satisfy the increasing demand of trillions of wireless sensors for IoT. RF energy harvesting is generally achieved by RF-DC conversion using a rectifying antenna (called rectenna). For weak RF signal, however, RF-DC conversion efficiency significantly decreases because weak RF signal cannot activate the diode in the rectenna. Therefore, in...
Shear wave elastography is useful for quantitatively evaluating tissue elasticity by measuring the speed of a shear wave induced within the body by acoustic radiation force. We proposed a pushing-and-tracking sequence, coded push-pulse excitation to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the observed shear wave propagation without increasing measurement time and push-pulse amplitude1). In this...
Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are hypothesized to play a role in the sonoporation mechanisms. Sofar, the production of ROS has been mainly reported inside the cytoplasm of cells after sonoporation. However, the acoustical phenomenon triggering the production of ROS is unknown. In this context, we investigated whether the interaction between microbubbles (MBs) and ultrasound (US) induce the production...
Pulmonary embolism (PE) is the third-leading cause of death from cardiovascular disease. Currently, PE is treated via catheter-delivered, ultrasound-enhanced thrombolysis using side-fired, low-intensity ultrasound energy (0.5 W/cm2) at ∼2 MHz to reduce the required dose of thrombolytic drugs because of the enhanced drug penetration into the clot. However, several clinical studies have shown that the...
Hydroxyapatite (HAp) is a useful biocompatible material and is used for the surface coating of artificial bone. It has been reported that the oriented HAp promotes rapid recovery of the bone fracture[1], although most of coating HAp layers on the commercial artificial Titanium (Ti) bones are not oriented. As a new coating layer, our group has reported the highly oriented HAp film on Ti substrate fabricated...
A transparent transducer array is desired in backward-mode photoacoustic imaging (PAI). CMUT technology is especially suitable for this application because of its wide bandwidth and a wide selection of processing materials. We have previously demonstrated a single-element CMUT with an ITO bottom electrode for improved transparency. The device showed 40% to 70% optical transmission from 700 nm to 900...
High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) have been an attractive research topic for some time now. HIFU studies have started with single-element transducers, but using arrays provide the opportunity to scan the focal point electronically. Modular and scalable driving systems that can adapt to custom-made transducer elements to drive these arrays are needed and at the present time there are few such...
Acoustic Angiography enables high resolution and high SNR imaging of microbubble contrast agents. The technique relies on pulsing and receiving at two widely separated acoustic bandwidths to reject signal from the tissue. To date this technique has been used to evaluate microvasculature within tumors and kidneys, but has not been used to visualize in vivo blood flow within heart, or liver. These targets...
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