A wearable ultrasonic assembly for point-of-care autonomous diagnostics of malignant growth

摘要

Clinicians generally agree that the most effective way to treat a malignant tumor within body organs is to detect it early. Currently, detection is mostly based on clinical diagnostics triggered by specific symptoms, which is often too late allowing the malignancy to reach an advanced stage. Automated high-resolution monitoring of body parts at regular intervals can be highly effective for detection of an anomalous growth - either primary or recurrence - at an early stage. In this paper, we propose a wearable, point-of-care (POC) ultrasonic imaging assembly to perform unsupervised, periodic monitoring of body parts for early detection of cancerous growths. We use ultrasound technology, which is safe, low-cost, can be easily miniaturized, and amenable for long-term, convenient, online monitoring. The proposed system is capable of providing automated high-resolution images of susceptible volumes of interest in superficial cancer-prone organs (e.g. prostate, uterus, kidney, ovary and bladder) at periodic intervals. We explore the design space for such a system encompassing transducer design parameters, power and memory requirements. Next, we study the effectiveness of such a system using both ultrasonic software simulation (with Field II) as well as experimental evaluation (with medical ultrasound transducers and phantoms). We show that the proposed POC diagnostic system can reliably detect an anomaly at a much smaller size (mostly stage 1) than typically achieved through conventional symptomatic detection.