CIUS fall conference day 2016

CIUS director Asta Håberg opened the day before leaving the floor for the invited speakers Dr Alan Hunter from University of Bath, and Dr Hua Wang from MIT.

Dr Hunter spoke on the topic “Underwater crime scene investigation for the London Metropolitan Police”, where the challenge is to develop an autonomous, compact, easy-to-use and affordable sonar vessel for finding missing persons and objects related to crime. He took us through the progress in the project so far, and future challenges, like identifying small objects.

Dr Wang’s presentation on “Seismic Propagation in Borehole Environment” took us through the use of wave dispersion characteristics by modelling of single and dual cased wells.  He presented a novel method for depicting and characterizing bore holes, even through double steel layers, using ultrasound.

After a quick update on plans for the CIUS website and intranet by web- and communications officer Kari Williamson, it was time for speed updates. The topics ranged from improving ultrasound technology and image analysis to clinical applications. See the programme below for details.

The partner presentations ranged from open heart surgery applications and innovative projects, to the use of portable ultrasound at the patient bedside, also by non-expert users.

First speaker was Erik Swensen, Vice President R&D at Medistim, who talked about the use and challenges of developing reusable ultrasound probes for monitoring vessel patency in open heart, peripheral and transplant surgery. He was followed by Svein-Erik Måsøy, CEO Inphase Solutions, who talked about innovation projects including using ultrasound for wireless transfer of information and power as well as for use in quality assurance. The last speaker in this section was Håvard Dalen, Professor NTNU and Senior Consultant Cardiology St. Olavs Hospital, who showed how portable ultrasound devices can be used with great success by medical students, medical residents and nurses, and how it improves diagnostic accuracy, and thereby reducing time to treatment

The final session saw updates from academia with Fabrice Prieur, Postdoc at UiO, talking about the use of 2nd harmonics, which is commonly used in medical ultrasound for SONAR imaging (non-linearity and its challenges). He demonstrated that the use of 2nd harmonics provides additional information also in SONAR.  Lasse Løvstakken, Professor NTNU, taking us through the latest in Doppler, software beamforming, functional ultrasound imaging and 3D tracking. CIUS Board Director and Programme Manager at GE Healthcare, Eva Nilssen, concluded the conference with a summary of the day.

The next CIUS conference day will be held in the last week of April and by request from our partners, the CIUS spring meeting will be extended to 1.5 day to get more time for workshops and partner-academia interaction.

The presentations will be made available on the CIUS intranet.

The programme:

• Opening and presentation of CIUS’ results for 2016 and plans for 2017 (Professor Asta Håberg)
• Underwater crime scene investigation for the London Metropolitan Police (Professor Alan Hunter, University of Bath, UK)
• Seismic Propagation in borehole environment (Dr. Hua Wang, MIT, USA)
• Presentation of CIUS intra- and internet pages (Kari Williamson, web- and communications, CIUS)
• Speed updates:
  • Optimisation of Ultrasound Pulses for Second Harmonic Imaging, Thong Huynh, HSN
  • Experimental Evaluation of Broadband Wave Propagation in Plates, Andreas Talberg, NTNU
  • Deep learning, Erik Smistad, NTNU/SINTEF (Read Smistad’s blog on the same topic.)
  • 3D Vector Flow, Morten Smedsrud Wigen, NTNU
  • Improving Quality of Cardiac Ultrasound Images, Ali Fatemi, NTNU (Read Fatemi’s blog on the topic)
  • Ultrasound and Multimodal Image-Guided Interventions, Tormod Selbekk, SINTEF
  • VScan in Stroke Diagnosis and Follow-Up, Lars Mølgaard Saxhaug, NTNU/Levanger Community Hospital.
  • The Dynamic Range of Adaptive Beamformers, Andreas Austeng, UiO
• Medistim (Erik Swensen, Vice President R&D)
• Inphase Solutions (Svein-Erik Måsøy, CEO)
• US cardiology in a non-expert setting (Nord-Trøndelag, HUNT) (Professor Håvard Dalen, St. Olavs Hospital and NTNU)
• Non linearity in underwater acoustics, and other things (Postdoc Fabrice Prieur, UiO)
• Ultrasound blood flow imaging – state of the art and future perspectives (Professor Lasse Løvstakken, NTNU)
• Closing remarks (Eva Nilssen, CIUS Board Director and Programme Manager GE Healthcare, and Asta Håberg, NTNU)