Nonlinear and Multimolecular Deep Tissue Ultrasound Imaging

Ultrasound offers excellent deep tissue imaging, but at the cost of high speckle noise, low resolution, and limited molecular information. While ultrasound is widely used in the clinic, it cannot reliably diagnose many important diseased states, such as differentiating tumors from benign masses of tissue.

This project will address these challenges with a rapid scan, nonlinear difference-frequency
ultrasound (DFUS) instrument for deep tissue imaging of cell types, cellular interactions, and cancer. The team has developed a method of compounding images taken at different frequencies and angles to reduce speckle noise. Beyond imaging nonlinear tissue contrast, they will use DFUS for multimolecular ultrasound imaging. This project will pave the way for better cancer diagnosis and enable new insights into the biological mechanisms of cellular and molecular rearrangements of vasculature during development, coronary disease, or tumor angiogenesis.