New ultrasound technology could revolutionize society

WASHINGTON, March 19, 2024 – The thorax, the part of the body between the neck and abdomen, provides medical professionals with a valuable insight into a patient's respiratory health. By assessing the sound vibrations produced by the airflow induced within the lungs and bronchial tree during normal breathing, and the sound vibrations produced by the larynx during vocalization, doctors can diagnose diseases within the respiratory system. Related potential anomalies can be identified.

However, among other drawbacks, general respiratory assessment can be subjective and is only as good as the quality of the test. Although the advent of multipoint electronic stethoscopes has been helpful in terms of identifying abnormalities during normal breathing, there is still a lack of technological devices that can help identify the characteristics of surface vibrations produced by vocalizations. .

In AIP Publishing's AIP Advances, a team of French researchers demonstrated the effectiveness of ultrasound technology to detect low-amplitude movements caused by vocalizations on the surface of the chest. They also demonstrated the potential of using the “Airborne Ultrasonic Surface Motion Camera” (AUSMC) to map these oscillations over short periods of time and explain their evolution.

“AUSMC is a new imaging technique that allows us to observe the vibrations of the human thoracic surface due to respiratory and cardiac activity at high frame rates, typically 1,000 images per second,” said author Mathieu Couade. . “This technology shares the physical principles of traditional ultrasound Doppler imaging, but does not require the application of a probe to the skin.”

Researchers tested AUSMC on 77 healthy volunteers with the aim of replicating the “vocal cords” (vibrations on the body's surface caused by vocalizations) that are typically analyzed during a chest physical exam. , imaged the surface vibrations caused by natural vocalizations. They reported that the induced surface vibrations were detectable in all subjects.

“We found that the spatial distribution of vibrational energy is asymmetric, benefiting from the appropriate size of the thorax, and the frequency is dependent on the anterior-posterior axis,” Quade said. “As expected, the frequency distributions of vocalizations do not overlap between men and women, and are higher in the latter.”

Ongoing clinical trials will focus on identifying lung pathologies using AUSMC. But researchers hope that combining this technology with artificial intelligence algorithms will usher in a new era of chest exams that can isolate vibration patterns. This provides a better window into respiratory health and allows for better diagnosis of respiratory diseases.

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The article “Airborne ultrasound for non-contact mapping of surface thoracic vibrations during human vocalizations: a pilot study” was written by Frédéric Wintzenrieth, Mathieu Coade, Feizheun Lehanneur, Pierantonio Laveneziana, Marie Cécile Niérat, Nicolas Verger, Mathias Fink, Thomas Similowski , and Ross Kiri Ing. This article will be published in his AIP Advances on March 19, 2024 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0187945). After that date, it can be accessed at https://www.doi.org/10.1063/5.0187945.

About the journal

AIP Advances is an open access journal that publishes in all areas of the physical sciences: applied, theoretical, and experimental. The comprehensive scope of AIP Advances makes it an essential tool for scientists across the physical sciences. See https://aip.scitation.org/journal/adv.

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