REVIEW ARTICLE
Overview of Recent Advancement in Ultrasonic Imaging for Biomedical Applications
Chiaki Miyasaka, Sanchiro Yoshida*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2018Volume: 12
First Page: 133
Last Page: 157
Publisher ID: TONIJ-12-133
DOI: 10.2174/1874440001812010133
Article History:
Received Date: 11/1/2018Revision Received Date: 18/2/2018
Acceptance Date: 26/2/2018
Electronic publication date: 31/12/2018
Collection year: 2018
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
This paper discusses the application of acoustic microscopy to the detection of cancerous cells. Acoustic microscopy is a well-developed technique but the application to biological tissues is challenging. Acoustic microscopy images abnormality based on the difference in the acoustic impedance from the background. One of the difficulties in the biomedical applications is that since both normal and abnormal cells consist of mostly water, their acoustic impedance is quite close to each other. Consequently, the contrast of the image tends to be low. Another issue is concerning the spatial resolution. For higher resolution, the use of a short wavelength is essential. However, since the attenuation of an ultrasonic signal increases quadratically with the frequency, the reduction in the wavelength compromises the image quality. The present paper addresses these issues and describes various techniques to overcome the problems.