Ultrasound Thermography: Principles, Methods, and Experimental Results

Portable, handheld, and affordable blood perfusion imager for screening of subsurface cancer in resource-limited settings

“…Our analysis has further demonstrated congruence between the changes in lesion blood perfusion and that of in situ structural parameters such as vessel density and vessel area measured by optical biopsy method. This method, in a generic sense, also paves the way for contrast-free assessment of abnormal microvascular physiology, if integrated with more advanced medical thermometric devices such as microwave thermometry ( 39 ), ultrasound thermography ( 40 ), CT ( 41 ), and MRI ( 42 ) thermometry.…”

“…Premised on the principle of local change in blood microcirculation’s being associated with the metabolic need of the lesions at different growth phases ( 12 , 13 ) and the alteration of thermal field as a consequence of local thermoregulation ( 33 ), this ML-augmented approach executed in community healthcare-based settings is proven to report unambiguous differential classifications of cancerous and precancerous traits, as validated by double-blinded clinical trials with the gold-standard biopsy data as the benchmarking reference. Further, going beyond the specific scope of diagnosing superficial lesions, the present method opens up newer possibilities of arriving at a generic principle of contrast-free and accurate mapping of a variety of diseased traits by establishing correlation with complementary evidence-based principles ( 39 – 42 ).…”