[...] MIT engineers have come up with an alternative to conventional ultrasound that doesn't require contact with the body to see inside a patient. The new laser ultrasound technique leverages an eye- and skin-safe laser system to remotely image the inside of a person. When trained on a patient's skin, one laser remotely generates sound waves that bounce through the body. A second laser remotely detects the reflected waves, which researchers then translate into an image similar to conventional ultrasound.
In a paper published today by Nature in the journal Light: Science and Applications, the team reports generating the first laser ultrasound images in humans. The researchers scanned the forearms of several volunteers and observed common tissue features such as muscle, fat, and bone, down to about 6 centimeters below the skin. These images, comparable to conventional ultrasound, were produced using remote lasers focused on a volunteer from half a meter away.
[...] In recent years, researchers have explored laser-based methods in ultrasound excitation in a field known as photoacoustics. Instead of directly sending sound waves into the body, the idea is to send in light, in the form of a pulsed laser tuned at a particular wavelength, that penetrates the skin and is absorbed by blood vessels.
The blood vessels rapidly expand and relax—instantly heated by a laser pulse then rapidly cooled by the body back to their original size—only to be struck again by another light pulse. The resulting mechanical vibrations generate sound waves that travel back up, where they can be detected by transducers placed on the skin and translated into a photoacoustic image.
While photoacoustics uses lasers to remotely probe internal structures, the technique still requires a detector in direct contact with the body in order to pick up the sound waves. What's more, light can only travel a short distance into the skin before fading away. As a result, other researchers have used photoacoustics to image blood vessels just beneath the skin, but not much deeper.
Since sound waves travel further into the body than light, Zhang, Anthony, and their colleagues looked for a way to convert a laser beam's light into sound waves at the surface of the skin, in order to image deeper in the body.
Based on their research, the team selected 1,550-nanometer lasers, a wavelength which is highly absorbed by water (and is eye- and skin-safe with a large safety margin). As skin is essentially composed of water, the team reasoned that it should efficiently absorb this light, and heat up and expand in response. As it oscillates back to its normal state, the skin itself should produce sound waves that propagate through the body.
The researchers tested this idea with a laser setup, using one pulsed laser set at 1,550 nanometers to generate sound waves, and a second continuous laser, tuned to the same wavelength, to remotely detect reflected sound waves. This second laser is a sensitive motion detector that measures vibrations on the skin surface caused by the sound waves bouncing off muscle, fat, and other tissues. Skin surface motion, generated by the reflected sound waves, causes a change in the laser's frequency, which can be measured. By mechanically scanning the lasers over the body, scientists can acquire data at different locations and generate an image of the region.
More information: Xiang Zhang et al. Full noncontact laser ultrasound: first human data, Light: Science & Applications (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41377-019-0229-8
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @01:01AM (2 children)
How long until you use it against the Uyghurs?
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @01:12AM
As long as it takes to flip the switch from the 25 watt laser to the 2 petawatt laser.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @01:17AM
What, you think the Chinese are going to diagnose the Uyghurs into submission?
Idiot.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @01:11AM (3 children)
Wasn't there a contest awhile back to try and create some of the diagnostic tools built into the tricorders used in Star Trek? Seems like this might be one piece of the puzzle.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 23 2019, @01:20AM
Yes, it's exactly what you would want for a tricorder.
Here's the contest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricorder_X_Prize [wikipedia.org]
No team was able to meet all of the requirements.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @03:32AM (1 child)
One slight difference. This appears to require a line-of-sight to the patient's skin in the area being scanned.
I wonder if tuned microwave lasers ("masers") could be used in place of these lasers, to scan through clothing?
Of course then there'd be privacy issues.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @07:02AM
If the technology becomes good enough, the device becomes the doctor.
People who don't want to bare it all to a human doctor can just use the tricorder.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NickM on Monday December 23 2019, @01:14AM (2 children)
New imaging technology is always great news but a non radiological volumetric technique is awesome because CTscan must always be used as kind of last resort technique as they involve a nonnegligeable dose of ionizing radiations. A non ionizing device would allow doctors to use imaging at the start of the diagnostic process. It would probably cause overdiagnosis for a few years but as doctors adjust it would greatly increase the speed and the accuracy of diagnosis.
Also I would love to get some DICOM files produced by this technique.
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 23 2019, @01:52AM (1 child)
TFL (to the full paper) has this statement at the end:
Also,
ie, BACON!
(Score: 3, Funny) by number11 on Monday December 23 2019, @04:12AM
I like mine crispy. Could you turn the power up a bit, please?