Flexible Ultrasound System
The Challenge
We do not have fully-sufficient non-invasive diagnostic imaging capability and techniques to diagnose conditions listed on the Space Medicine Exploration List such as renal stones, bone fractures, bone density degeneration, intracranial pressure and cardiovascular pathologies.
The Progress
The Flexible Ultrasound System ground demonstration unit development is an effort to begin taking advantage of these new technologies while retaining the capabilities of clinical ultrasound. We are targeting several types of ultrasound capabilities including quantitative ultrasound for bone health monitoring, low intensity pulsed ultrasound for fracture healing, a wideband single-crystal quantitative ultrasound probe, acoustic renal stone manipulation, and volumetric ophthalmic imaging to monitor intracranial pressure. These techniques require support of novel probes, full control of beam-forming and power, full access to the raw ultrasound data and wide frequency range of operation.
The ground-based units currently being developed are available to existing partner principal investigators to integrate their modalities and for future ultrasound researchers to aid in developing new ultrasound diagnostic and therapeutic modalities on a state of the art ultrasound platform.
