Naval Ultrasound Equipment Adapted to Scan Through Human Fat
A new ultrasound system employs once top-secret electronic hardware to help doctors scan obese patients. Warships use the technology in sonar equipment to locate mines at long range. It was designed to overcome the problem of sound waves weakening over large distances, producing a blurred image.
The same obstacle faces doctors confronted by obese patients, whose numbers are rapidly increasing. Conventional ultrasound scans cannot penetrate deeper than about 12 centimeters with any clarity. Obtaining clear images of internal organs, such as livers and kidneys, is difficult in patients with large amounts of body fat.
The new ultrasound developed by Qinetiq, formerly part of the Defense Evaluation and Research Agency, uses unique "beam forming" technology to increase its range. This alters the way the ultrasound beam is produced at the transducer and the way signals bounced off objects are received.
Ross gooding, sales manager at Qinetiq's Marine and Acoustics Center in Weymouth, Dorset, said: "When hunting mines, you want to find them as far as possible from your ship, but the clarity of the image you get significantly falls off the further away you get.
"This technology allows you to double the resolution of the sonar at any given distance. If you're looking for a mine at 400 meters, the picture you get would be as clear as if it was 200 meters away.
"The same thing applies when scanning patients with ultrasound. The more you've got to push the sound through the layers of fat the less it will penetrate. Effectively, most ultrasound systems give a nice clear image down to about 12 centimeters, after which the clarity deteriorates. Of course, if you start to slap 10 to 15 centimeters of fat on top of that you've lost an awful lot of the signal and the clarity. "The new ultrasound produced clear images even when penetrating thick layers of fat, while using less energy than conventional devices." Qinetiq will not produce the machine commercially itself, but instead license out the technology to manufacturers. Gooding said he hoped to see the device being made available to hospitals "in a year or so".(DPA)