Posted on 09/30/2019 9:08:48 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Alongside a familiar looking greyscale scan there is a new, far sharper colour image produced by the new technique.
The scanning technology itself is not new. The innovation has come in physics, statistics - and bubbles.
Clinicians have long used microbubbles to increase the contrast of ultrasound images.
These are typically tiny capsules of hydrocarbon gas in a lipid shell, each bubble a fraction of a millimetre across.
Clouds of them are injected into a patient's bloodstream to diagnose liver and other diseases.
The team first used physics to observe how individual microbubbles behaved.
"They're very small, about the size of a red blood cell, so they go everywhere the blood goes" says physicist Dr Mairead Butler.
"We've looked at bubbles in tubes, out of tubes, one by one."
Once the physics of microbubbles had been established, Dr Weiping Lu used statistics and computing power to reveal what ultrasound scans had not been able to show before.
If they go somewhere unexpected, it could be a sign of cancer - and one detectable much earlier than before. These are super-resolution images showing details far beyond the physical limitations of the scanner.
In normal conditions, scanning a patient's abdomen would show details no smaller than a millimetre across. The new images are already 10 times better and the team expect to be able to refine the process to see yet smaller features.
Trials on human patients are expected to begin before the end of 2019 at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Good news.
Do the bubbles stay in you forever or what?
Don Ho was unavailable for comment.
In my bubble ultrasound in the Spring, they didn’t. Don’t know about this technology.
Great.
I wonder if this could replace some CAT scans and MRIs.
They’re probably burped out or... the other place... :)
(Your body cleans them up either through the liver or kidneys or get eaten by antibodies.
But will the NHS let people have access to it, and if they do, how long will people have to wait to undergo it?
That has been known for 60 years.
Well played
Since their "encapsulant" is a lipid, they are probably digested -- like any other fat...
As long as it doesn’t make people get expensive toxic treatment for some “maybes.”
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