ViSE affiliate to speak at upcoming BME seminar
The Biomedical Engineering seminar next week will be given by Brett Byram, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Byram will discuss his research in a talk entitled “Decluttering Diagnostic Ultrasound: Searching for the Polar Bear in the Blizzard”. The seminar will begin at 12:20 on Tuesday, November 5 in Stevenson Center 5326.
Abstract:
Medical ultrasound has undergone a renaissance over the last decade with a range of new approaches for therapy and diagnostics. I will suggest some causes for the explosion of new methods and review a selection of the most promising advances, including functional brain imaging, new methods for therapy, and synthetic aperture techniques for transient phenomena in measurements of blood flow and elastography. Most of these methods have been shown to work clinically particularly in model patients (literally, patients with the proportions of runway models), however, when these methods are applied to average patient populations their quality—and the quality of ultrasound in general—can drop off propitiously. I will describe my current work to improve ultrasound image quality using a model-based beamforming approach, which still preserves the signal features necessary for most advanced ultrasound techniques. I will describe the model conceptually and then demonstrate the potential of model-based algorithms to reveal structures hidden by ultrasonic clutter. I will also demonstrate the potential of the model to study the role of ultrasonic image degradation more broadly.