Originally published November 8 2005
Duke engineers improving ultrasound applications for heart patients
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
At Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, professor Stephen Smith heads a project that is developing ultrasound 3-D technology that could one day allow cardiologists to view the heart's interior and correct arrhythmias by selectively removing damaged heart tissue.
"No one else has developed a way for ultrasound to combine therapy and imaging in a catheter, let alone 3-D imaging," said Stephen Smith, the biomedical engineering professor who heads the project at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering.
In an interview, he said his group's technique may improve on doctors' most widely used method for destroying -- or "ablating" -- aberrant tissue that makes hearts beat irregularly.
That current technique employs radio waves emitted from the end of an electrode probe that touches and excessively heats tissue selected for destruction.
After threading that internal probe into the heart through arteries, physicians must now rely on fluoroscopic imaging -- X-ray movies -- to help point the device.
"However, a fluoroscope cannot image soft tissue at all," Smith said.
Duke biomedical engineers previously pioneered techniques rendering the kind of soft tissue internal images that enable fetuses to be seen in the womb.
During the past five years other researchers have followed up by developing tiny internal ultrasound imaging probes than can provide physicians better visual guidance than X-rays for internal surgery, Smith said.
But those previous tiny probes acquire only two-dimensional images, which still have shortcomings for pinpoint tissue ablation, he said.
Meanwhile, other researchers have separately crafted probes using stronger ultrasound waves to heat internal tissues for ablation rather than for imaging.
His group's new work builds on its previous success at miniaturizing ultrasound 3-D imaging probes to a dime-sized array of hundreds of individual ultrasound sound sending and receiving elements, called transducers.
In another paper prepared for an October 2003 IEEE ultrasonics symposium, Smith and his former graduate student Kenneth Gentry -- now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin -- described using a prototype device to first image and then raise the temperature of a tissue-mimicking rubber by 25 degrees Fahrenheit.
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