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As ultrasound is being used more and more to assist the guidance of needle insertion in nerve blocks, gaining vascular access, biopsies and therapy procedures, clinicians all deal with the same issue: How to get a clear view of the needle in their ultrasound image?  Accurate needle visualization can be difficult due to the small foot print the needle leaves combined with the tissue/speckle pattern that appears around the needle. 

In Phase Shift Variance Imaging, by the Department of Medical Engineering of Ruhr-Bochum and the Department of Experimental Molecular Imaging, Medical Faculty, RWTH Aachen University, a novel criterion for microbubble destruction defection that allows uniform back ground suppression is proposed.  The microbubble detection technique presented in the paper is based on the variance of the phase shift of consecutive echoes.  The changes in response to a sequence of identical pulses are recorded and then analyzed.

In his thesis, Rumman Mahmud from George Mason University wrote on developing a standard method for 3D carotid artery imaging using freehand ultrasound scanning.  Current diagnosis of a stroke involves an ultrasound duplex Doppler examination of the carotid arteries, which gives information on the severity of luminal stenosis caused by atherosclerotic plaque.  Rumman Mahmud’s thesis presents a standardized system to enable reproducing carotid artery plaque volumes so the progression can be monitored in longitudinal studies using freehand 3D Ultrasound grayscale imaging. 

In his thesis at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Cong-zhi Wang wrote on the Development of a Vibro-ultrasound Method for Muscle Stiffness Measurement In Vivo.  A number of methods have been developed to quantitatively assess muscle stiffness, such as indentation assessment, sonoelastography, transient elastography, SSI, SDV and MRE.  All of them have unique features and limitations in vivo studies.  The paper shows that the newly developed vibro-ultrasound method can be a unique tool for muscle stiffness assessment in research and clinical practices.

Recently in the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, a paper was published, by Ihor Trots, Yuriy Tasinkevych, Andrzej Nowicki and Marcin Lewandowski, presenting the multi-element synthetic transmit aperture (MSTA) method with a small number of elements transmitting and all elements apertures in medical ultrasound imaging.  Compared to the other methods, MSTA allows the increase of the system frame rate and provides the best compromise between penetration depth and lateral resolution.

Harnessing the power of our software based platform, we have developed a new modality for researchers, which allows for real-time acquisition of 128 parallel channels of RF data.  The SonixDAQ, released in 2010, allows researchers to acquire preformed data, sampled up to 80MHz for applications such as beamforming, photo acoustics, and shearwave tracking.

As ultrasound is being used more and more to assist the guidance of needle insertion in nerve blocks, gaining vascular access, biopsies and therapy procedures, clinicians all deal with the same issue: How to get a clear view of the needle in their ultrasound image?  Accurate needle visualization can be difficult due to the small foot print the needle leaves combined with the tissue/speckle pattern that appears around the needle. 

Our research team is at the IEEE International Ultrasonix Symposium in Orlando, Florida this week to present a solution for making the needle clearer in ultrasound. Based on their paper, Adaptive Spatial Compounding for Needle Visualization, they proposed an adaptive tensor-analysis based spatial compounding method to enhance the needle visualization.  To find our when the full paper will be available for you to ready, please keep following our blog or select "research" as your specialty and subscribe to our news updates.   

Each year Ultrasonix presents awards to two university students who make the largest impact on the Ultrasonix research community through their:

• Contribution to open-source programs and code that help the research community

• Active support of other students with questions related to Sonix RP and SonixTouch Research usage

The award includes $500 for the student and a transducer for their lab.

We are pleased to announce the winners of the 1st annual Ultrasonix Student Award. This award is given to the university students who make the largest impact on the Ultrasonix research community through their:

- Contribution to open-source programs and code that help the research community
- Active support of other students with questions related to Sonix RP and SonixTOUCH Research usage

The award consists of $500 for the student and a transducer for their lab.

Congratulations to both winners!

The engineering team here at Ultrasonix is focused on delivering reliable and durable products to market. One tool we use to determine possible issues is to run a series of tests on a vibration table to simulate real world transport and daily use conditions. We applied random vibration and shock loading to the Sonix Touch system to see how it would perform. Check out the video showing the SonixTOUCH on the Vibration Table.