Faster, Smarter Diagnosis: $2.6M in Federal Grants Fuel Next-Gen Ultrasound

A Carle Illinois College of Medicine researcher is leading the development of new advanced ultrasound solutions to improve disease diagnosis and medical research. It’s being led by Carle Illinois College of Medicine Health Innovation Professor Michael Oelze, who is also a professor of bioengineering, with support from three new federal grants totaling over $2.6M.  The funding will spearhead efforts to solve problems with existing ultrasound technologies and increase accessibility to new breakthroughs in ultrasound imaging.

With support from a $2.2M grant from the National Institutes of Health, Oelze and research partner Zhengchang Kou, PhD, are engineering a solution that will expand clinical and research access to ultrafast 3D volumetric ultrasound imaging – a technology that can yield richer diagnostic information, capturing data on both depth and motion in real time.  “We are uniquely positioned to develop and construct this system due to the expertise on campus and hardware innovations coming out of our lab,” Oelze said.

Progress toward an ultrafast 3D imaging modality for ultrasound has stalled due to the $1M price tag associated with the current imaging hardware needed to make the jump. Oelze and Kou are seeking to solve this problem by incorporating several innovations in hardware. Their system will leverage ultrasound over Ethernet, which enables the rapid transfer of large amounts of data, novel parallel beamforming approaches to speed volumetric frame rate, and commercial off-the-shelf parts. Their goal is to build a system that can perform ultrafast volumetric imaging and can support a 2D array at a cost of under $70k.

“By developing this system, we believe that many more researchers and companies can participate in the development of high-quality volumetric 3D ultrasound imaging. There is a lot of excitement about our project, and many colleagues are planning to purchase our systems once we have them completed,” Oelze said.

Oelze and his team are using a separate grant awarded from the NIH to develop a novel technique to solve one of the long-standing problems with color flow imaging – a form of ultrasound that can quantify and visualize blood flow. For diagnostic applications such as tracking blood flow in a beating heart, high flow rates can produce artifacts that result in incorrect data.

“We have been developing a technique that overcomes this issue using an encoding scheme with Doppler-tolerant codes,” Oelze said. Three CI MED students – Gyung Seol, Nick Kelhofer, and Brian Hong – are working with Oelze and his team on the vascular imaging component of the project. “Our goal in the grant is to develop and demonstrate this technology on a clinical ultrasound scanner and validate it in vivo [in a live organism.]”

Oelze is also working with a team from North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina, and Duke University to develop a Center for Manufacturing Ultrasound Systems for Intelligent Care (cMUSIC), with a primary site at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“The goal of this center is to work with industry partners to design, develop, and construct the next generation of diagnostic ultrasound technologies,” Oelze said, noting the involvement of several faculty members from the Departments of Bioengineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering. “We believe the cMUSIC Center will impact not only academic centers and the biomedical ultrasound industry long term, but will also lead to improved health care delivery through innovation.”

The center will form relationships with industry to commercialize new large-scale ultrasound systems like those Oelze’s team is developing. It will also educate a new generation of ultrasound engineers.

Editor's note: 

Michael Oelze is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Frederick G. and Elizabeth H. Nearing Scholar at The Grainger College of Engineering, and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Bioengineering. He leads the Ultrasound Research Laboratories at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.