Augmented reality system could make medical ultrasounds easier to interpret
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Close Caption: MIT researchers have developed a new approach to ultrasound imaging that allows the user to visualize a 3D augmented-reality image of the object being scanned. Using a virtual-reality headset, they can see a precise 3D digital representation of what the object actually looks like, making it easier to identify and analyze. Credits: Credit: Courtesy of the researchers Previous image Next image Interpreting medical ultrasound images is a difficult task, requiring a technician to look at 2D images and mentally arrange them into a 3D representation of what the tissue looks like. To make that job easier, MIT researchers developed a new approach to ultrasound imaging that allows the user to visualize a 3D augmented-reality image of the object being scanned.
Using a virtual-reality headset, they can see a precise 3D digital representation of what the object actually looks like, making it easier to identify and analyze. This technique could help speed up the training process for ultrasound technicians and other health care providers who use ultrasound. It could also be deployed for use in hospitals, for tasks such as using ultrasound to place a needle in the right location for a biopsy.
“For training, this could make ultrasound more intuitive and more understandable. On the clinical side, it could be less time-consuming, more accurate, and also give health care providers more peace of mind. They wouldn’t have to wonder if they missed anything,” says Canan Dagdeviren, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and the senior author of the study.
MIT graduate students Jason Hou and Shrihari Viswanath are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Communications Engineering. Other authors of the paper include Bowen Wu ’24 and two MIT Summer Research Program students, Cinay Dilibal, a senior at Dartmouth College, and Tanisha Shende, a senior at Oberlin College. Ultrasound imaging works by bouncing high-frequency sound waves off tissues in the body, which are then reflected back to an ultrasound transducer.
The transducer converts these sound waves to electrical signals, which are used to create a 2D image of the tissue. Ultrasound technicians are trained to convert these images into a 3D mental representation of the tissue. “It's a difficult skill to master, and there are long learning curves,” says Hou.
“The hardest thing is this mental tomography bottleneck where you’re trained to reconstruct the 2D slices in your 3D mental space. That is a cognitive burden that can lead to inaccuracies in scanning.”
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