Breakthrough adds new color to ultrasound; makes images easier to interpret
Inspired by a 19th-century set of mathematical functions, University of Rochester researcher Kevin Parker has devised a way to incorporate new color identifications in ultrasound medical images, making it easier to differentiate fine details that currently appear as indistinguishable objects in shades of gray.
The new imaging format would be especially valuable in helping physicians interpret ultrasound images of soft tissue, including muscle, glands, and organs such as the liver.
“This has been a great goal” of ultrasound research since the 1970s, said Parker, the William F. May Professor of Engineering. The technology, described in a paper in Physics in Medicine & Biology, provides more detailed soft tissue images than other attempts, based on quantitative backscattered imaging, Parker said.
Ultrasound uses pulses of high frequency sound waves that bounce back echoes when they strike cells or arteries. These echoes are also known as scattered waves. The bouncing back gives the ultrasound image its features. With few exceptions – such as Doppler-enhanced ultrasound imaging of blood flow – those features consist of varying shades of black, white, and gray reflecting different densities.
“If you look at an ultrasound image of the liver, there are so many things in there – veins, arteries, biliary ducts, liver cells, perhaps some scar tissue – and they’re all just displayed as black and white blobs,” Parker said. “If there’s a large artery, it’s easy to see the wall and the blood inside. But at the finer levels of detail, it is often impossible to tell if you’re looking at a smaller artery or 10 little cells.”
A set of mathematical functions — devised in 1890 by the great mathematician Charles Hermite of France and rarely used in engineering — provided Parker with a way to approach this problem. He came across the functions while perusing a handbook of transforms and applications, and immediately recognized that Hermite’s functions closely approximated ultrasound pulses.
“I realized if we used these, it would make our analyses of ultrasound scattering easier,” Parker said. “So now, instead of ultrasound images showing all of these tissue structures as black and white objects, we can now classify them mathematically (by their size) and assign unique colors to unique types of scatterers.”
Working with UR Ventures, the University’s technology transfer office, Parker has secured a provisional patent on the technology, called H-scan.
“It can be implemented on ultrasound scanners, so I am hoping companies will license it, and put it into clinical trials,” Parker said.
“By letting us see things we can’t see now, it could be very important to individual patients.”
Eventually, H-scan might also be applicable to sonar and radar, he said.
Since the early 1960s, University of Rochester researchers such Raymond Gramiak, Robert Waag, Edwin Carstensen, and Parker have produced pioneering clinical and technological advances in diagnostic ultrasound imaging. The Rochester Center for Biomedical Ultrasound, formed in 1986, includes nearly 100 researchers, including visiting scientists from around the country.
Reinventing the social contract in an age of Big Data
Prof. Alex “Sandy” Pentland of MIT will address the social impact of Big Data at the Data Science Seminar, 11 a.m., November 1, in the Hawkson-Carlson Room at Rush Rhees Library.
Big Data is bringing a transparency that is threatening personal privacy, is reinventing law as algorithm, and is reforming our ideas about human society, rationality, and autonomy, producing a new computational social science, says Pentland, who directs the MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs and previously helped create and direct the MIT Media Lab. The lessons of this new science, together with new privacy and security technologies, should be used to reinvent the social contracts that underpin our societies.
Pentland is one of the most cited scientists in the world, and Forbes recently declared him one of the “7 most powerful data scientists in the world.”
‘Looking like the enemy’ links WWII internment to current debates
Members of the Mochida family in Hayward, California, awaiting an evacuation bus to be relocated to an internment camp soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor. (National Archives and Records Administration.)
“Looking like the Enemy: The WWII Japanese American Experience” is a Humanities Project exhibit and lecture organized by Joanne Bernardi, associate professor of Japanese, which will examine the experiences of Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II – and their relevance to current debates about terrorism, the refugee crisis, and illegal immigration.
The lecture, “A Pilgrimage to World War II Japanese-American Internment Camps,” will begin at 5 p.m., November 16, in the Gowen Room of Wilson Commons. Notch Miyake of Rochester will describe the journey he took with photographer Margaret Miyake to the remote, desolate sites where the internment camps were located.
The exhibit, featuring Margaret Miyake’s photographs in the Hartnett Gallery of Wilson Commons, begins with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. November 17, and runs through December 11. The photographs are supplemented with postcards and other ephemera from Bernardi’s Re-Envisioning Japan Collection.
“While this exhibit acknowledges the injustice done to incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II, it focuses more on what can be learned from their responses to their incarceration,” Bernardi says. Inside barbed wire enclosures, the internees created viable, self-sufficient communities. They drained swamps and irrigated deserts to grow crops to feed themselves. Their young men served in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated U.S. military unit in the war, and one with a high rate of fatalities.
“At the same time, greater awareness of the Japanese-American interment through exhibits like this one can help the nation avoid repeating the conditions that led to the violation of rights of so many innocent people,” Bernardi says. Read more here. All events are free and open to the public.
Introducing a new faculty member . . .
Kathryn Mariner has joined the Department of Anthropology as an assistant professor after finishing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University’s Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies. As a cultural anthropologist, Mariner examines the intersection of race, class, and kinship in the United States through the frame of adoption and social inequality. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States, based on her research at a private adoption agency in Chicago between 2009 and 2016. The book explores the speculative logics of adoption by attending to how raced and classed exchanges of power, money, and knowledge produce notions of the child as an imagined future. The book is based on Mariner’s doctoral dissertation, which won the Lichtstern Distinguished Dissertation Prize from the University of Chicago’s Department of Anthropology. Mariner is also trained in clinical social work and uses that background to inform her ethnographic practice.
Deadline for Humanities Center fellowships is Dec. 1
The Humanities Center will award semester-long fellowships to two University of Rochester tenure-track assistant professors in humanistic fields for proposals that address the theme of “Memory and Forgetting.” The deadline for applications is December 1, 2016.
Fellows will receive an allowance of $5,000 for research and travel related to their project.
Fellows will continue to receive their regular compensation from the University. During their time as a fellow they will be relieved of regular teaching responsibilities, though obligations for University service continue. They are expected to be in residence in Rochester and to play an active role in the center’s community of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates.
They will participate in the bi-weekly Humanities Center seminar and in the center’s other workshops, conferences, and programs. Fellows will present the results of their research at least once during their tenure at the center. The fellowship period is September 1, 2017 to May 15, 2018.
Applicants may be in any field of humanistic study, including anthropology, art and art history, English, history, modern languages and cultures, music, philosophy, or religion and classics.
Applications should include the following:
A cover letter.
A research proposal of no more than 1,000 words.
A CV.
A letter of support from the chair of the applicant’s department.
For further information, contact the center’s director, Joan Shelley Rubin, at joan.rubin@rochester.edu.
Keynote addresses will be presented in the Class of ’62 Auditorium (G-9425) and a poster session will be held from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in Flaum Atrium at the School of Medicine and Dentistry.
Keynote speakers include:
10:00-11:00 a.m. – Guido Silvestri, professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine: “Immune Control of Virus Replication Under ART.”
12:30-1:30 p.m. – B. Matija Peterlin, professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco: “HIV Latency & Reactivation.”
1:30-2:30 p.m. – Paul A. Wender, professor of chemistry & chemical and systems biology at Stanford University: “Progress Toward an HIV/AIDS Eradication Strategy.”
The deadline to submit posters is Monday, November 14. Register posters here. Contact Laura Enders with questions or for more information about World AIDS Day events.
PhD dissertation defense
Eric Brown, Biomedical Engineering, “Adaptive Properties of Human Reflexive Head Movements During Linear Motion.” 9 a.m., Nov. 9, 2016. Dewey 1-1101. Advisors: Greg Gdowski and Gary Paige.
Mark your calendar
Oct. 31: Applications due for awards from Health Sciences Center for Computational Innovation. Awards are for short-term, early-phase work by lab staff to allow investigators to translate their ideas into computer code or models, and to get new biocomputational and health-related scientific projects up and running. Click here to view the full RFA.
Nov. 1: “Reinventing the social contract in an age of Big Data,” by Alex Pentland, professor at MIT. Data Science Seminar. 11 a.m., Hawkson-Carlson Room, Rush Rhees Library.
Nov. 1: Deadline to apply for a CTSI Population Health Research Postdoctoral Fellowship. Click here for more information and application instructions.
Nov. 3: Phelps Colloquium: Alexander Pena, instructor with Eastman Community Music School and director of ROCmusic, presents “Transforming our At-Risk Community through the Power of Music.” 4 p.m., Max of Eastman Place. For more information or to RSVP, contact Adele Coelho at 273-2571 or at adele.coelho@rochester.edu.
Nov. 12: RocHD3: Rochester Healthcare Deep Data Dive, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saunders Research Building. Read more here.
Nov. 14: Initial abstracts due for Incubator Program awards of up to $125,000 per year for each of two years to foster interdisciplinary research collaborations in biomedical research, through the Scientific Advisory Committee of the School of Medicine and Dentistry. Click here for more details. Contact Anne Reed for more information.
Nov. 16: Lecture: “A Pilgrimage to World War II Japanese-American Internment Camps.” Notch Miyake. 5 p.m., Gowen Room, Wilson Commons. Part of “Looking like the Enemy: The WWII Japanese American Experience” Humanities Project.
Nov. 17: Reception to begin exhibition of Margaret Miyake’s photographs as part of the “Looking like the Enemy: The WWII Japanese American Experience” Humanities Project. 5 p.m. Hartnett Gallery. Exhibit runs through Dec. 11.
Dec. 1: Deadline to apply for Humanities Center semester-long fellowships for proposals that address the theme of “Memory and Forgetting.” To apply, click here.
Dec. 1: Center for AIDS Research eighth annual HIV/AIDS Scientific Symposium. Keynote addresses in the Class of ’62 Auditorium (G-9425) and a poster session from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in Flaum Atrium. Contact Laura Enders with questions or for more information.
Dec. 2: Applications due for Collaborative Pilot Studies and Junior Investigator Awards from the Wilmot Cancer Institute. Contact Pam Iadarola for more information.
