Marie Muller
North Carolina State University, NC·Biomedical Engineering
Ultrasound is cheap, portable and radiation-free. However, in hard-to-image tissues such as the air-filled lung, it mostly produces pictures that experts interpret by eye rather than numbers.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
quantitative ultrasound
lung ultrasound
ultrasound multiple scattering
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- Develop methods to reduce chest-wall effects and optimize data acquisition for lung quantitative ultrasound (LQUS) in human subjects.
- Apply LQUS in patients with heart failure to measure the severity of pulmonary edema (fluid in the lungs) and to monitor how patients respond to diuretic treatment.
- Test whether LQUS metrics of the lung tissue can diagnose idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and assess its severity in patients.
- Develop and optimize an ultrasound multiple scattering (USMS) method that uses raw ultrasound data from contrast-filled vessels to measure microvascular density and anisotropy without invasive procedures.
- Establish in two rodent tumor studies that USMS parameters can characterize angiogenesis and tumor malignancy, then compare their diagnostic power with standard point-of-care ultrasound in a preliminary human study.
More about the research
Sound waves scatter many times in these tissues, which garbles conventional images. This research turns that multiple scattering into a source of information. It extracts quantitative ultrasound (QUS) measures from raw ultrasound data to describe tissue microstructure. One project applies this approach to lung disease, and the other to the networks of tiny blood vessels that grow in tumors.
Why it matters
Patients with heart failure or pulmonary fibrosis could one day have their lungs monitored at the bedside without radiation or costly CT scans. For breast cancer, mammography can be ineffective in some populations, and MRI faces cost, access and contrast-agent concerns. A more specific contrast-enhanced ultrasound could therefore help separate lethal cancers from harmless findings. The same vessel measurements might eventually help predict plaque rupture in atherosclerosis.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kourosh Kalayeh
University of Michigan, MI·Biomedical Engineering
Establish normal dynamic contrast-enhanced ultrasound (DCEUS) kidney blood-flow values in healthy volunteers, accounting for biological sex and left versus right kidney.
Flemming Forsberg
Thomas Jefferson University, PA·Biomedical Engineering
Implement multiparametric ultrasound, combining contrast-enhanced, subharmonic, dispersion and viscoelastography imaging, on a commercial 3D transrectal probe, and adapt an MRI-based fusion and registration system for it.
Ivan Rosado-Mendez
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Biomedical Engineering
Optimize S-Doppler, a statistical and deep-learning ultrasound reconstruction method, in calibrated tissue-mimicking phantoms to maximize resolution and contrast when imaging tiny blood vessels.
The school
North Carolina State University: 40 labs on PI Pages, $717M a year on research, 603 research doctorates a year.
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