Life After Grad School Seminar | Ultrasound Tomography Breast Cancer Imaging

Medical imaging is a very important tool that helps diagnose, mitigate, and prevent disease. Breast tissue is imaged routinely to locate cancer with the hopes of finding the disease in infancy. X-ray mammography, a common tool used to diagnose breast cancer, has problems with the ability to detect lesions in dense breasts. Alternatives, such as MRI, are very expensive. Conventional ultrasound techniques mitigate some of the problems of mammography, but also suffer from their own. To mitigate and improve upon many of these issues of the other imaging modalities, Delphinus Medical Technologies Inc., has developed the SoftVue™ ultrasound imaging system. Ultrasound tomography is capable of producing conventional B-mode ultrasound reflection images as well quantifying acoustic parameters such as sound speed and attenuation. The reconstructed images then can provide radiological information that can find and differentiate benign and malignant breast disease. In order to accomplish the goal of producing a commercial medical device to benefit the patient, diverse teams ranging from research to marketing must work together. In addition to the science of ultrasound tomography, the role of researchers in this environment will be discussed.