Patented Ultrasound Technologies Improve Diagnosis for Cancer and Other Diseases

Four recently issued patents boost ultrasound scanners to detect obscured pathologies.

New technologies developed at the University of Rochester could soon help make ultrasound a more powerful tool for diagnosing cancer, liver disease, and other pathologies.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office recently issued four patents for diagnostic ultrasound technology developed by Kevin Parker, the William F. May Professor of Engineering at the University’s Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, and his doctoral students. Parker says some of the technologies have already been licensed to startups that want to bring the advances into clinics for the benefit of patients everywhere.

“Many diseases, including some malignant cancers, can still be hiding or obscured in medical imaging,” says Parker. “There are many cases where you’d like the picture to be crystal clear, but you can’t really see it. So, we used advanced physics, math, and scattering theory to pull out the hidden features from ultrasound data that could indicate problems with organs such as the liver, thyroid, or breast.”

Two of the patents are related to the H-scan technique developed in Parker’s lab and the other two focus on reverberant shear wave fields.

H-scan takes a standard black-and-white ultrasound image and attributes colors to features—for example, coding fat accumulating in the liver as yellow or cancer appearing in the breast as red.

The technologies related to reverberant shear wave fields provide new capabilities for elastography—detecting the stiffness of tissue. “Many pathologies change the tissue properties including stiffness,” says Parker. “If your liver is getting stiff it’s probably bad, if your brain is getting stiff, it’s not good, and many cancers show up as stiff lesions.”

Parker says the technologies offer cheaper, faster, and better ways of getting the information to doctors and radiologists. And since his inventions focus on ultrasound image processing, they can be easily retrofitted to existing ultrasound equipment and do not require new hardware.

“These are inventions that you can retrofit to existing imaging systems. You can reprogram the scanners to process our way and out comes this new analysis and information,” says Parker. “We don’t have to recreate a whole new generation of ultrasound scanners.”

Parker says some of his key collaborators included Juvenal Ormachea ’19 PhD (electrical and computer engineering) and Jiyhe Baek ’23 PhD (biomedical engineering). He worked closely with UR Ventures, which protects, develops, and commercializes the intellectual property arising from research at the University, to secure the patents: