A team led by the company's chief technology officer, Neb Duric, PhD, developed and applied an algorithm based on waveform tomography to determine if ultrasound tomography could generate images with comparable resolution to MRI. Their research included 50 women who had both breast MRI and ultrasound tomography; the group then compared ultrasound tomography coronal images with MR images reconstructed in the coronal plane and also matched the two modalities' images to allow for slice-by-slice comparisons.
The spatial resolution of the ultrasound tomography images was 0.7 in the coronal plane, while MRI had a resolution of 1.6, Duric and colleagues found. In other planes, MRI resolution was 0.8 and ultrasound tomography was 2.
These findings suggest that the similarity in spatial resolution between the two modalities could lead to further development of high-resolution 3D imaging with ultrasound for detecting breast cancer, the group concluded.
