News
September 2023
The Duke Ultrasound group attended the IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium (IUS) 2023 this month in Montreal, Canada. Dr. Derek Chan delivered a talk entitled "3-D Acoustic Radiation Force Impulse (ARFI) Imaging for Targeted Biopsy of Prostate Cancer: Demonstration of Clinical Feasibility and Utility" which provided a detailed overview of a clinical study in which ARFI Imaging was compared to MRI and systematic sampling for Prostate Cancer tumors detection.
Dr. Kathy Nightingale presented a talk on behalf of lab member Dr. Courtney Trutna-Paley, whos work was entitled "Effect of Knee Flexion on 3D Shear Wave Propagation in in Vivo vastus lateralis." Courtney's presentation focused on the observed relationship between knee flexion angle in the imaged patient to an increase in shear wave speed anisotropy along versus across the direction of muscle fibers in the vastus lateralis (VL). This data was collected in a healthy volunteer study.
Dr. Felix Jin also presented a talk entitled "Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Modeling Acoustic Radiation force-Induced Shear Wave Propagation and the Reconstruction of Material Parameters from Observations," which centered around the application of PINNs in Shear Wave Elastography, of which include the prediction of wave propagation in ITI materials and the derivation of material parameters such as shear modulus, and coefficient of anisotropy from synthetic datasets.
Matthew Huber from the Gregg Trahey lab delivered a presentation on his poster entitled "Adaptive Acoustic Power and Frequency Adjustment in Color Doppler Imaging" in which he discusses his simulation work to adaptively tweak and tune clinical scanner parameters to achieve better quality images. Parameters for tuning include temporal Color Doppler SNR and other imaging parameters. Congratulations Dr. Chan and Matthew!
Pictures from the conference as well as some sights from Montreal! Courtney, Kathy, Felix not pictured
August 2023
We want to extend a warm welcome to our newest undergraduate student in the lab, Kaden Bock. Kaden will be helping us work on optimizing some of our SWEI protocols for 3D characterization of breast tissue, as well as helping to improve our robot setup which is part of our ongoing skeletal muscle characterization study!
The Fall 2023 semester has begun and the Duke Ultrasound Group is ready for the new academic year! This semester Dr. Nightingale returns to teach BME354: Biomedical Instrumentation, and Wren Wightman and Shruthi Srinivasan are part of the TA team, along with Clare Cook from the Horstmeyer lab.
July 2023
Best congratulations to Dr. Derek Chan and co-authors on the acceptance of their most recent paper, entitled "Combined ARFI and Shear Wave Imaging of Prostate Cancer: Optimizing Beam Sequences and Parameter Reconstruction Approaches" to the journal Ultrasonic Imaging. The doi can be found here !!
June 2023
Students Wren Wightman and Shruthi Srinivasan of the Nightingale lab attended the Ultrasonic Imaging and Tissue Characterization Symposium in early June and both presented a talk!
Shruthi's talk was entitled "Robot-Assisted 3D Rotational Shear Wave Elasticity Imaging" and Wren presented on some work by our undergraduate student Reed Chen, entitled "Emulating Clinical Muscle B-Modes Using a Two Stage Machine Learning Model." For more information related to the conference and the other talks which were presented, visit the website here.
May 2023
The hooding ceremony took place in mid-May of this spring. Congratulations to the graduates of the Duke Ultrasound Group, Dr. Derek Chan, Dr. Felix Jin and Dr. Courtney Paley!!
Also huge congratulations to Dr. Mark Palmeri for being nominated and receiving the 2023 Onshape Educator Award for University Educator of the Year! Congratulations Mark!
Finally, a hearty congratulations to Dr. Kathryn Nightingale for stepping up to become the Director of Graduate Studies at Duke Biomedical Engineering starting next semester!
April 2023
Congratulations to Derek Chen for his most recent paper's acceptance to the Ultrasonic Imaging journal, titled "Combined ARFI and Shear Wave Imaging of Prostate Cancer: Optimizing Beam Sequences and Parameter Reconstruction Approaches," feel free to check it out here!
Congratulations to our undergraduate student Reed Chen for presenting his work titled "Emulating Clinical Muscle B-Modes From Plane Wave Images Using a Two Stage Machine Learning Model" at the 2023 Graduation with Departmental Distinction poster session. We are very proud of you Reed, and know that you have a very bright future ahead!
Another shoutout to Reed and his team for winning First Place in the Faculty Award and Second Place in the People's Choice Award Categories at this year's BME Design Symposium! Their teams project was entitled BP Watchdog by Radius, and was supervised by Dr. Pat Wolf. Congratulations!
March 2023 (Thesis Defense Alert!!)
A HUGE CONGRATULATIONS to the newly minted Dr. Courtney Trutna-Paley and Dr. Derek Chan for their successful theses defenses this month!
Courtney's defense was entitled "Ultrasonic Rotational 3D Shear Wave Elasticity Imaging of In Vivo Skeletal Muscle", in which she discussed the determination of robustness of Rotational 3D SWEI as a viable method for the characterization of muscle, the development of reconstuction algorithms for 3D-SWEI data, and the effect of knee flexion on shear wave propagation in leg muscle, specifically the vastus lateralis.
Derek's defense was entitled "A 3D Multiparametric Ultrasound Elasticity Imaging System for Targeted Prostate Biopsy Guidance," in which he discussed processing algorithms for shear wave data in high-quality prostate cancer imaging, neural network training to measure displacement and perform multiparametric ultrasound imaging in the prostate, and a recent clinical study targeting prostate cancer in vivo during transperineal biopsy using ARFI imaging.
December 2022
We had two group members submit papers to Ultrasound for Medicine and Biology recently, and both of their papers have been made available online:
Courtney Trutna Paley, whos paper "Repeatability of Rotational 3-D Shear Wave Elasticity Imaging Measurements in Skeletal Muscle" can be found right here. Congratulations Courtney!
Congratulations also to Dr. Bofeng Zhang, whos paper is entitled "Quantifying the Impact of Imaging Through Body Walls on Shear Wave Elasticity Measurements." You can find the paper here!
Wren Wightman and Shruthi Srinivasan had the opportunity to attend the IEEE UFFC: Waves and Transducers special short course this month, in which they learned about wave theory and considerations of transducer making, while making some great friends along the way! Here they are with their very own DIY single-element transducer
The Duke Ultrasound group would like to wish you a very Happy Holidays!
November 2022
The Nightingale Lab hosted students from Hillside High School this last month, to show them the ropes of ultrasound and it's vast applications both inside and out of the lab. Lab group member Reed provided some demonstrations of ultrasound using portable laptop ultrasound scanners, and Shruthi gave a brief introduction to the new UR10e robot we are working with now (updates to follow!).
Special thanks to Reed for organizing the event and getting these students excited about engineering research!
October 2022
Updates from the Duke Ultrasound Group regarding their presentations at IEEE IUS 2022:
Derek Chan gave a lecture entitled "Screening and Image-Guided Targeted Biopsy of Prostate Cancer Using 3D Acoustic Radiation Force Impulse (ARFI) Imaging." Courtney Trutna Paley gave two lectures titled "On the Correlation Between Knee Flexion and 3D Shear Wave Speed and Amplitude in In Vivo Vastus Lateralis" and "3D SWEI Improves Precision over 2D SWEI Both ALong and Across Fibers in Healthy In Vivo Skeletal Muscle Measurements". Anna Knight presented her poster entitled "Factors Affecting SV Mode Shear Wave Propagation in Elastic, Incompressible, Transversely Isotropic Materials in Both 2D and 3D Using Ultrasonic Rotational 3D SWEI."
Felix Jin delivered a lecture entitled "Modeling Shear Wave Propagation in an Incompressible, Transversely Isotropic Material Using Physics Informed Neural Networks" and presented a poster titled "An Open-Source Radon-Transform Shear Wave Speed Speed Estimator with masking Functionality to Isolate Different Shear-Wave Modes." Matthew Huber also gave a lecture titled "An Adaptive Acoustic Ouput Selection Method Feasible for Implementation on Existing Systems" and presented a poster titled "Human Observer Sensitivity to Temporal Noise in Ultrasound Imaging."
Here are some snapshots of the presentations and subsequent adventures in Italy!
