ultrasound

Perfectly sanitized dimpled spinach leaves or tender greens like baby lettuce has been high on the wish list of the $3.1 billion bagged-salad industry since its inception. The race to develop better wash systems for cleaning took off in earnest in 2006, after the high-profile E. coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to bagged spinach killed five people and sickened more than 200, leaving the leafy green industry with a black eye and an ego-bruising $350 million price tag in recalls and lost sales.

Advances to date in cleaning salad greens have mostly centered on chlorine-based washes and plenty of … Read more

Male birth control hasn't progressed since condoms and vasectomies were devised more than 100 years ago. And while the idea of using therapeutic ultrasound to zap sperm has been kicked around for decades, it has never been sufficiently reliable for contraception.

Until now.

Researchers have now found that a commercially available therapeutic ultrasound generator and transducer can significantly deplete the sperm count of rats. The team, based out of the University of North Carolina, relied on funding from the Parsemus Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The results are notable because they improve on the only promising … Read more

Eight months and several hurdles after receiving 510(k) clearance, mobile-health company Mobisante says its smartphone ultrasound device is officially on the market.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance alone took so long that the MobiUS system--intended to be used in fetal, abdominal, cardiac, pelvic, and peripheral vessel imaging--only works with the 2-year-old Windows Mobile 6.5-based Toshiba TG01 smartphone and requires a USB 2.0 port for the probe. In other words, it won't be compatible with iPhones and Android-based phones, which don't support USB 2.0.… Read more

NASA's historic final mission of its 30-year space shuttle program may be delayed a day or two because of weather, but regardless of when the Atlantis launches, it will be delivering a customized, cutting-edge cardiovascular ultrasound system to the International Space Station.

The Vivid q is, according to GE Healthcare, a compact, lightweight diagnostic ultrasound system roughly the size of a laptop. It has been designed to image and assess cardiac performance in space, and to investigate the association between lengthy space missions and the weakening of astronauts' heart muscles.

The crew will also participate in the Integrated Resistance and Aerobic Training Study to determine whether high-intensity, low-volume exercise can minimize loss of muscle, bone, and cardiovascular function in the crew.

In March, 3M and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency announced they'd be installing the Littmann Scope-to-Scope Tele-Auscultation System on the International Space Station to enable physicians to listen to the heartbeats of space travelers. Presumably, the Vivid q will replace not just the 10-year-old ultrasound previously used, but eventually the high-tech stethoscope, too.… Read more

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif.--Meredith Perry and Nora Dweck, two freshly minted University of Pennsylvania graduates, were at the exclusive D9 tech conference this week showing off their compelling technology demo: Ultrasonic power transfer.

uBeam, the company they created around their tech, uses sounds waves beyond the range of human (and dog) hearing to transmit power. In a proof-of-concept demo (see video), Perry was able to move 5 volts at 50 milliamps, or a quarter of a watt, over three feet. She says that with custom components, not the off-the-shelf piezo speakers roughed into the tech demo, she'll be able to send 25 watts over ten feet.

Engineers I talked to at D9 were skeptical that the science will scale up to this theoretical transfer wattage. There may also be challenges on health grounds, although Perry says that the transmission method is OSHA-approved and that similar technology is safely used in directed sound products. She also says that unlike microwaves, which can be used to transfer power but that are dangerous when absorbed by living tissue, uBeam ultrasound is reflected, not absorbed. But 25 watts is a lot of energy to pump through the air, and to be fair, Perry does say she got the idea for uBeam by reading about how sound waves (granted, of different frequencies) can be used as weapons. … Read more

Let's just get right to it: This is not an article about soft porn. Neither is this man trying to eat what appears to be a seafood pasta dish out of his partner's belly.

However ill-conceived this illustration may be, it is an entirely realistic prediction of body positions if the beltlike device around the pregnant woman's belly is actually giving this man a view of an unborn baby.

Called PreVue, the concept gadget comes to us via industrial designer Melody Shiue at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who just won a design award … Read more

In 2010 alone, some 217,730 men in the U.S. have been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and some 32,050 have died from it, according to the American Cancer Society. But diagnosis relies largely on painful, nontargeted biopsies that result in many false negative results.

So researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands have been developing a technique that uses ultrasound to more effectively target tumors, and they say they've had great success in the four patients on whom they've tested it.

The technique involves injecting microbubbles of a contrast agent into the patient. Using … Read more

It all started more than 25 years ago, when James C. Tilton, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, began investigating a novel way to analyze the pixels that comprise digital images.

He devised an algorithm that took image segmentation (grouping pixels at different levels of detail) to a whole new level; he not only found regional objects, but also grouped spatially separate objects into region classes. In other words, applied to a satellite image, it could not only identify and separate lakes of varying depths, but could recognize lakes as a class of objects spatially distinguishable from, say, trees.

He calls this Recursive Hierarchical Segmentation, and it has been used to analyze Earth-imaging data from NASA's Landsat and Terra spacecraft to improve snow and ice maps, find potential locations for archeological digs, etc. It is now being applied to medical imaging to improve mammograms, ultrasounds, digital x-rays, and more.

"My original concept was geared to Earth science," says Tilton, who was at first skeptical that his algorithm could enhance, say, mammography. "I never thought it would be used for medical imaging."

Then he processed cell images and saw details not visible in unprocessed displays of those images. "The cell features stood out real clearly, and this made me realize that Bartron was onto to something."

Bartron Medical Imaging, based out of Connecticut, has since developed the new MED-SEG system, which the FDA recently cleared for use by trained professionals to process images alongside other images, though stipulated that the system should not (at least yet) be used for primary image diagnosis.

Bartron, which first studied the software through Goddard's Innovative Partnerships Program Office, licensed the patented technology in 2003 to create a system that would differentiate hard-to-see medical image details. It then began to work with doctors to analyze CT scans, MRIs, ultrasounds, etc.… Read more

No, you are not reading The Onion. A computer program created at the University of Central Florida that directs a robotic arm to grab objects with just one touch was deemed by many participants in a pilot study to be "too easy" to use--a finding the designers had not anticipated.

"We focused so much on getting the technology right...We didn't expect this," says developer Aman Behal, an assistant professor of engineering and computer science at UCF.

The computer program directs the robotic arm into action based on voice command, touch screen, computer mouse, or … Read more