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05/12/2008
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Could the latest technologies provide more accurate breast cancer screening?
 While the most common method for early detection of breast cancer is mammography, critics believe the procedure is not the most effective tool for detecting tumours.
Traditional ultrasound technology is another option and uses sound waves that travel through water, bouncing off tissue to create a mirror image. However, ultrasound images can often be fuzzy, making it difficult to detect small and subtle tissue variations. In addition, ultrasound only identifies a possible mass, without being able to distinguish its type.
TechniScan Medical Systems has attempted to address the issue by developing a scanning system to differentially characterise amongst normal, benign and malignant tissue. The company’s Ultrasound CT system is designed to provide physicians with a diagnostic, non invasive imaging tool that may provide detailed information about the physical structures and bulk tissue properties of the breast.
Unlike traditional breast ultrasound which measures the echo of sound waves as they reflect off tissue to produce images, Ultrasound CT uses transmission ultrasound to produce two sets of images – one based on the speed of sound and one based on the attenuation of sound. The images from these two different measurements can be displayed in many orientations for review by a radiologist.
Ultrasound transducers take pictures at 180 positions, with each cycle creating an image ‘slice’. About 30 to 50 slices are required to complete the full image. The transducers are connected in a seven node Linux cluster to stream below the raw ultrasound data onto a 2Tbyte RAID system. As data from each slice is transferred to storage, the remaining nodes in the cluster start computing the image from the raw data. This distributed data uses TechniScan proprietary algorithms to create 3d images representing the physical structures within the breast and their spatial relationship. Additionally, it provides information about the speed and attenuation of sound values of tissues registered in all three spatial directions. This supplies data about tissue properties not previously available to physicians and radiologists.
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Author
David Pursley
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