"H-scan Trajectories Indicate the Progression of Diseases"

A paper co-authored by PhD student Jihye Baek and Professor Kevin Parker titled "H-scan trajectories indicate the progression of diseases" has been published in Medical Physics. The abstract follows; more information can be found here.

Abstract: Purpose: The ability of ultrasound to assess pathology is increasing with the development of quantitative parameters. Among these are a set of parameters derived from the recent H-scan analysis of subresolvable scattering. The emergence of these quantitative measures of tissue/ultrasound interactions now enables a study of the unique trajectories of multiparametric features in multidimensional space, representing the progression of specific diseases over time. We develop the mathematical and visual tools that are effective for classifying, quantifying, and visualizing the steady progression of several diseases from independent studies, all within a uniform framework. Methods: After applying the H-scan analysis of ultrasound echoes, we trained a support vector machine (SVM) to classify the unique trajectories of progressive liver disease from fibrosis, steatosis, and pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) metastasis. Our approaches include the development of trajectory maps and disease-specific color imaging stains. Results: The multidimensional SVM image classification reached 100% accuracy across the three different studies. Conclusion: H-scan trajectories can be useful to track the progression of multiple classes of diseases, improving diagnosis, staging, and assessing the response to therapy.