There are many acoustic phenomena that affect ultrasound image quality such as multiple reflections of sound (reverberations), a varying speed of sound in tissue (aberrations), sidelobes, and artifacts from lungs (air) and bones. This is particularly challenging when imaging e.g., the heart, as the sound waves may be partly blocked by ribs and lungs.
The goals of the Image Quality group are:
- To perform research and development of new beamforming algorithms and image quality improvements for improved patient care.
- To demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods in clinical studies.
- To create innovations from our research and bring new methods and algorithms to clinical practice by commercialization in collaboration with our industrial and clinical partners.
In the image quality team, we perform research to address these challenges with a focus on:
- Aberration correction
- Reverberation correction
- Coherence imaging
- Synthetic aperture beamforming
- Deep beamforming (beamforming using Machine Learning)
The team addresses these challenges with a clinical focus aimed at cardiovascular and obstetrics and gynecology imaging.
We are a team dedicated to research for innovation purposes and have a strong collaboration with several national and international industry partners and clinics at the St. Olavs hospital, Trondheim University Hospital. Our projects are aimed at challenges faced by both the industry and the end users, clinicians, and our projects are always caried out in close collaboration with both these parties to ensure we address real-world challenges and make sure our solutions may be commercialized and used in hospitals across the world.
