Ultrasound imaging innovations for live monitoring of complex flow dynamics
Dr. Alfred Yu, Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Waterloo
Perhaps popularly known for its use in fetal scanning, ultrasound has already been enjoying a widespread role in today’s clinical practice. Nevertheless, one demerit point that has been limiting ultrasound’s diagnostic potential is its arguably second-rated image quality.
In this talk, various cardiovascular ultrasound innovations with drastically superior visualization capabilities will be presented. At the core of our solutions is the design and use of a channel-domain imaging research platform that comprises a programmable transmit front-end, a pre-beamformed data acquisition module, and a GPU-based high-speed computing platform.
With this enabling hardware, it becomes possible to image complex flow dynamics at very high frame rates of over 1000 fps by making use of plane wave excitation principles. The visualization performance of these flow imaging innovations will be illustrated through a series of carotid bifurcation imaging cineloops.