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Improving Liver Ultrasound Image Quality in Difficult-to-Image Patients

Award Number: R01EB027100
ORGANIZATION: NATIONAL INSTITUTE Of BIOMEDICAL IMAGING & BIOENGINEERING
OPDIV: NIH
AWARD CLASS: DISCRETIONARY
AWARD ACTIVITY TYPE: SCIENTIFIC/HEALTH RESEARCH (INCLUDES SURVEYS)
PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE START DATE: 08/15/2020
PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE END DATE: 04/30/2024

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Improving Liver Ultrasound Image Quality in Difficult-to-Image Patients - ABSTRACT The prevalence of obesity in the United States has risen to record levels over the past 40 years, putting strain on the healthcare system and creating difficult challenges for medical imaging. We propose to overcome the challenges that obesity poses to ultrasound imaging by (1) developing novel image-quality improvement techniques, and (2) implementing them on pulse-echo ultrasound imaging systems to yield high-quality images of the liver. Ultrasound imaging is uniquely affected by the presence of additional connective tissue and thick subcutaneous fat layers in overweight and obese patients; these additional subcutaneous layers greatly exacerbate reverberation and phase-aberration of the acoustic wave, leading to high levels of clutter, degraded resolution, and overall poor-quality ultrasound images. Our proposed methods will determine the local speed-of-sound in abdominal tissue layers and use this information to accomplish distributed phase-aberration correction. We also apply machine learning techniques to model and suppress the effects of reverberation clutter and speckle noise. The combination of these techniques is expected to achieve significant improvements in liver image quality. These image-quality improvement methods will be implemented on a real-time ultrasound scanner and will be evaluated in clinical imaging tasks of overweight and obese patients undergoing ultrasound surveillance of hepatocellular carcinoma. Successful development of the proposed technology will not only enable high-quality ultrasound imaging of the liver in otherwise difficult-to-image overweight and obese patients, but also facilitate improved image quality across nearly all ultrasound imaging applications, for all populations.


Issue Date FY	Funding FY	Legal Entity Name	Legal Entity Address	Legal Entity City	Legal Entity State	Legal Entity Zip Code	Legal Entity COUNTY	Legal Entity COUNTRY	Assistance Listing	Award Code	Budget Year	Action Date	Action Type	Action Amount

Issue Date FY: 2025 ( Subtotal = -$4 )
2025	2023	THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY	450 JANE STANFORD WAY	STANFORD	CA	94305	SANTA CLARA	USA	Discovery and Applied Research for Technological Innovations to Improve Human Health	000	4	11/25/2024	NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION	-$4
														Subtotal = -$4

Issue Date FY: 2023 ( Subtotal = $550,389 )
2023	2023	THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY	450 JANE STANFORD WAY	STANFORD	CA	94305	SANTA CLARA	USA	Discovery and Applied Research for Technological Innovations to Improve Human Health	000	4	4/28/2023	NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION	$550,389
														Subtotal = $550,389

Issue Date FY: 2022 ( Subtotal = $551,305 )
2022	2022	LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY, THE	450 JANE STANFORD WAY	STANFORD	CA	94305	SANTA CLARA	USA	Discovery and Applied Research for Technological Innovations to Improve Human Health	000	3	6/3/2022	NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION	$551,305
														Subtotal = $551,305

Issue Date FY: 2021 ( Subtotal = $585,234 )
2021	2021	LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY, THE	450 JANE STANFORD WAY	STANFORD	CA	94305	SANTA CLARA	USA	Discovery and Applied Research for Technological Innovations to Improve Human Health	000	2	5/25/2021	NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION	$585,234
														Subtotal = $585,234

Issue Date FY: 2020 ( Subtotal = $590,183 )
2020	2020	LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY, THE	450 JANE STANFORD WAY	STANFORD	CA	94305	SANTA CLARA	USA	Discovery and Applied Research for Technological Innovations to Improve Human Health	000	1	8/11/2020	NEW	$590,183
														Subtotal = $590,183

Grand Total All Awards = $2,277,107

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Improving Liver Ultrasound Image Quality in Difficult-to-Image Patients

Award Number: R01EB027100

ORGANIZATION: NATIONAL INSTITUTE Of BIOMEDICAL IMAGING & BIOENGINEERING

OPDIV: NIH

AWARD CLASS: DISCRETIONARY

AWARD ACTIVITY TYPE: SCIENTIFIC/HEALTH RESEARCH (INCLUDES SURVEYS)

PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE START DATE: 08/15/2020

PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE END DATE: 04/30/2024

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