Published in MPW, 27 Oct 2014
Scientists in France have developed a new type of ultrasound that can produce three-dimensional videos at thousands of frames-per-second. The 3D ultra-fast ultrasound builds on the established technique of 2D ultra-fast ultrasound, and has already enabled its creators to witness blood flowing through the chambers of a human heart in real-time (Phys. Med. Biol. 59 L1).
Two-dimensional ultrafast ultrasound imaging was invented in 1999 by Mathias Fink and Mickael Tanter at ESPCI ParisTech through developments in the software and hardware used to process ultrasound images. It allowed the scientists to observe the mechanical shear waves that propagate rapidly through the body at several metres per second – and thereby opened up a kind of human-body “seismology” that could map the elastic properties of soft tissue. At least one commercial ultrasound scanner now delivers ultrafast 2D images, and many new applications have come along: mapping the flow of blood at high sensitivity, for example, or quantitatively characterizing tumours. […]
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