Congrats

Paper Accepted to IEEE ICASSP

Congratulations to Arun Nair on the acceptance of his manuscript to the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

Paper ID: 3434
Title: A DEEP LEARNING BASED ALTERNATIVE TO BEAMFORMING ULTRASOUND IMAGES
Session Title: ‘SAM Poster Session 4: Beamforming’
Authors: AA Nair, T Tran, A Reiter, MAL Bell

This conference will take place 15–20 April 2018.

[Preprint Available]

Prof. Bell Receives NSF CAREER Award

Congratulations to Prof. Bell for being selected to receive the NSF CAREER Award. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.  The objective of Prof. Bell’s proposal entitled CAREER: Technical & Theoretical Foundations for Photoacoustic-Guided Surgery is to apply optical analyses, spatial coherence theory, and independent resolution models to describe fundamental performance limits of photoacoustic-based navigation during robotic and nonrobotic surgery.

ECE Department Announcement

Malone Center Announcement

WSE Announcement

JHU Hub Announcement

LCSR Announcement

JMI Paper Accepted

Congrats to undergraduate student Margaret Allard on the acceptance of her first-author journal paper entitled Feasibility of photoacoustic-guided teleoperated hysterectomies. This paper will appear in the Journal of Medical Imaging (JMI) Special Section on Image-Guided Procedures, Robotic Interventions, and Modeling.

This paper is the first to describe the feasibility of photoacoustic integration with the da Vinci surgical robot to potentially guide minimally invasive hysterectomies and other gynecological surgeries.  To implement photoacoustic imaging, a novel light delivery system was designed and implemented  to surround da Vinci tools. This new light delivery system uniquely enabled the investigations described in the paper, including  the first known analysis of the optimal tool orientations for photoacoustic-guided hysterectomies using a da Vinci scissor tool (which partially blocks the transmitted light in some cases). This work can be extended to other da Vinci tools and laparoscopic instruments with similar tip geometry.

Margaret completed this work through her participation in our NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates in Computational Sensing and Medical Robotics.

Brooke Wins Second Place in Undergrad Poster Competition

Congratulations to PULSE Lab undergraduate student Brooke Stephanian on her 2nd place win in the Optics and Photonics Conference at JHU! She presented a poster that summarized the work she completed this semester on the topic “Theoretical Simulation to Optimize Short-Lag Spatial Coherence (SLSC) Photoacoustic Image Quality”.

Conference website: https://engineering.jhu.edu/ece/osa/hopkins-photonics-conference/

Journal Paper Accepted to IEEE T-UFFC

Congrats to Arun Nair on the acceptance of his paper entitled “Robust Short-Lag Spatial Coherence Imaging” to the IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control. This paper will appear in the special issue on sparsity driven methods in medical ultrasound.

This work is the first to re-examine the lag summation step of the Short-Lag Spatial Coherence (SLSC) algorithm and achieve additional robustness to coherence outliers through both weighted summation of individual coherence images (i.e., M-weighting) and the application of robust principal component analysis (i.e., Robust SLSC, or R-SLSC). Results show great promise for smoothing out the tissue texture of SLSC images, improving boundary delineation, and enhancing anechoic or hypoechoic target visibility at higher lag values. These improvements could be useful in clinical tasks such as breast cyst visualization, liver vessel tracking, and obese patient imaging.

Citation: AA Nair, T Tran, MAL Bell, Robust Short-Lag Spatial Coherence Imaging, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control (accepted) [pdf]

Also Available on Journal Website: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8166807/

Two PULSE Lab abstracts accepted to OSA Optics and Photonics Conference at JHU

Congrats to undergraduate student Brooke Stephanian and PhD student Derek Allman! Their abstracts were accepted to the 2017 Optics and Photonics Conference at Johns Hopkins University.

Brooke will present a poster entitled: Theoretical Simulation to Optimize Short-Lag Spatial Coherence (SLSC) Photoacoustic Image Quality 

Derek will give a presentation entitled: Using convolutional neural networks to eliminate reflection artifacts in experimental photoacoustic images

Conference details: https://engineering.jhu.edu/ece/osa/hopkins-photonics-conference/

Free registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/optics-and-photonics-conference-at-johns-hopkins-university-tickets-39142374897?aff=es2

SPIE Medical Imaging Paper Accepted

Our paper, “Feasibility of photoacoustic guided hysterectomies with the da Vinci robot,” was accepted for Oral presentation at SPIE Medical Imaging in the Image-Guided Procedures, Robotic Interventions, and Modeling conference.

Session 2
Keynote and Medical Robotics

Tuesday 13 February 2018
10:10 AM – 12:10 PM

Feasibility of photoacoustic guided hysterectomies with the da Vinci robot
Paper 10576-9
Authors: Margaret Allard, Joshua Shubert, Muyinatu A. Lediju Bell

Congrats to Margaret, Josh, and Prof. Bell!

Three Abstracts Accepted to SPIE Photonics West

Three PULSE Lab abstracts were accepted to SPIE Photonics West in the BiOS Conference Track: Photons Plus Ultrasound: Imaging and Sensing 2018 (Conference 10494). This conference track will take place Sunday- Wednesday  January -28-31, 2018 at the The Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.

  1. A novel drill design for photoacoustic guided surgeries 
    Paper 10494-18
    Authors: Joshua Shubert, Muyinatu Bell
    Session 3: Therapy Monitoring and Guidance II
    Sunday 28 January 2018
    1:30 PM – 2:45 PM
  2. Using convolutional neural networks to eliminate reflection artifacts in experimental photoacoustic images
    Paper 10494-190
    Authors: Derek Allman, Austin Reiter, Muyinatu Bell
    Session PTue: Posters-Tuesday
    Tuesday 30 January 2018
    6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
  3. Development and validation of a short-lag spatial coherence theory for photoacoustic imaging
    Paper 10494-193
    Authors: Michelle Graham, Muyinatu Bell
    Session PTue: Posters-Tuesday
    Tuesday 30 January 2018
    6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Congrats to  Josh, Derek, and Michelle!

Conference track website: https://spie.org/PWB/conferencedetails/photons-plus-ultrasound

SLSC Beamforming Code Now Available on UltraSound Toolbox

The UltraSound Toolbox (USTB) is a free MATLAB toolbox for processing ultrasonic signals. The primary purpose of the USTB is to facilitate the comparison of imaging techniques and the dissemination of research results. The PULSE Lab is proud to collaborate on this effort to deliver SLSC beamforming to the broader ultrasound community. An example using the SLSC algorithm on a CIRS phantom and on human heart data was added today, as described here: http://www.ustb.no/examples/advanced-beamforming/short-lag-spatial-coherence-slsc/. The heart and phantom datasets and the SLSC code are now freely available to use. Additional datasets and beamforming code can be found by perusing the USTB website.

Congrats to Ole Marius Hoel Rindal (our visiting student from the University of Oslo) for putting in the work required to pull this together!

USTB Announcement

Margaret Allard Receives Best Presentation Award

Congratulations to PULSE Lab undergraduate student Margaret Allard who received the best presentation award from the NSF REU program in Computational Sensing and Medical Robotics. Her presentation was entitled Identifying Optimal da Vinci Tool Orientations for Photoacoustic Guided Hysterectomies. Prof. Jerry Prince presented Margaret with this award.

This award was shared by Margaret Allard and Mindy Wagenmaker.

JHU ECE Department Announcement

JBO Paper Accepted

Our paper entitled Photoacoustic-based approach to surgical guidance performed with and without a da Vinci robot was accepted for publication in the Journal of Biomedical Optics (JBO) Special Section on Translational Biophotonics.

Congrats to undergraduates Neeraj Gandhi and Margaret Allard!

This work was completed in partnership with the NSF REU in Computational Sensing and Medical Robotics along with collaborators Sungmin Kim and Peter Kazanzides, and it is the first to integrate photoacoustic imaging with the da Vinci surgical robot. It was also featured on the journal homepage.

ECE Department Announcement

BioOptics World Article

Three Abstracts Accepted to IEEE IUS 2017

Three PULSE Lab abstracts were accepted for presentation during the 2017 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium (IUS) to be held on September 6-9, 2017 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington D.C., USA.

  1. “Theoretical Application of Short-Lag Spatial Coherence to Photoacoustic Imaging” to be presented by Michelle Graham in the MBB: Non linear and coherence imaging poster session, 3-4 pm on Thursday, September 7, 2017. (Abstract ID: 1526)
  2. “Photoacoustic Visual Servoing of Needle Tips to Improve Biopsy Targeting in Obese Patients” to be presented by Joshua Shubert in the MPA: Technical Developments in Photoacoustic Imaging poster session, 3-4 pm  on Friday, September 8, 2017. (Abstract ID: 1088)
  3. “Identification and removal of reflection artifacts in photoacoustic images using convolutional neural networks” to be presented by Derek Allman in the MIM: Machine learning poster session, 9:30-10:30 am on Saturday, September 9, 2017. (Abstract ID: 1523)

Congrats to Michelle, Josh, and Derek!

Symposium website: http://ewh.ieee.org/conf/ius/2017/

REU student wins first place award

Congratulations to PULSE Lab undergraduate student Blackberrie Eddins for winning the first place final presentation award in the 2016 NSF Computational Sensing and Medical Robotics (CSMR) Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at JHU! She tied in first place for this award with Luke Arend, another student participant.