Ultrasound as a multi-hyphenate: ultra-fast, super-resolved, 3-D, neuro-functional

It is an exciting time for ultrasound research which is currently seeing a surge of imaging and therapeutic advancements that have transformed the field. These advancements have been enabled by the new technical capabilities of programmable ultrasound scanners which acquire massive amounts of data at a high frame-rate and volumetrically. They have generated order-of-magnitude improvements in resolution and expansion into new territories for ultrasound in imaging and non-imaging applications, such as functional imaging and neuromodulation. As a consequence this new generation of ultrasound has seen a broadly expanded range of scientific interrogation, pre-clinical applications, and it is on the cusp of clinical applications that could fundamentally change diagnostic imaging and clinical practice. This talk addresses scientific challenges and opportunities especially as they apply to the brain, in Alzheimers disease, traumatic brain injury, neuromodulation, and functional imaging, but also and to other organs, such as lung ultrasound imaging, and liver cancer imaging.

Bio

Gianmarco Pinton is a Professor with the Lampe Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA, and North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC. He was a research scientist for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the Institut d'Alembert, Sorobonne Universite. He was born in Milan, Italy. He received a B.S. in Physics, a B.S.E, in Biomedical Engineering, and M.S. in Mathematics, and M.S. in Biomedical Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering, all from Duke University, Durham, NC. Dr. Pinton's primary research interest is on improving and developing new ultrasound techniques, including volumetric functional imaging super-resolution vascular imaging, and shock wave imaging techniques in the brain and abdomen and methods to model nonlinear wave propagation transcranially and in the human body, including acoustical and shear shocks. His work also includes the development of wave propagation simulation tools which can accurately model the complex aberrating, reverberating, and scattering propagation physics necessary to describe ultrasound imaging and propagation in the human body.