Abstract
Very high frame rate ultrasound imaging has recently allowed for the extension of the applications of echography to new fields of study, such as the functional imaging of the brain, cardiac electrophysiology, and the quantitative real-time imaging of the intrinsic mechanical properties of tumors, to name a few, non-invasively and in real time. In this work, we developed the first implementation of Ultrafast Ultrasound Imaging in three dimensions based on the use of either diverging or plane waves emanating from a sparse virtual array located behind the probe. It achieves high contrast and resolution while maintaining imaging rates of thousands of volumes per second. The propagation of remotely induced shear waves was tracked in the human breast in vivo and used to characterize its stiffness. 3-D Ultrafast Doppler revealed the complex 3-D flow patterns occurring in all four chambers of the human heart during an entire cardiac cycle, as well as the 3-D, in vivo interaction of blood flow and wall motion during the pulse wave in the carotid at the bifurcation. This seminar will explore how 3-D Ultrafast Ultrasound Imaging may enhance existing techniques and enable a host of novel research avenues from 3-D non-invasive angiography to the mapping of fibers in the heart.
Biography
Jean Provost was born in Montreal in 1983. He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Ecole Centrale Paris, and Universite Paris-Sud before obtaining a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia University in New York. He then became a Heart Rhythm Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University and is now a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellow at Institut Langevin, ESPCI, in Paris. His research interests include high-frame-rate ultrasound imaging, tissue motion and blood flow mapping, multi-wave imaging techniques, and high-intensity focused ultrasound ablation techniques.