Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 275405, 14 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/275405
Research Article

Possible Patient Early Diagnosis by Ultrasonic Noninvasive Estimation of Thermal Gradients into Tissues Based on Spectral Changes Modeling

1ESIME (Sede-Zacatenco) Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN), Avenida Instituto Politécnico Nacional s/n, México City, 07738 DF, Mexico
2Ultrasonic Signals, Systems and Technologies Laboratory, CSIC, Serrano 144, 28006 Madrid, Spain
3Departamento de Materiales, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de la Republica, Montevideo 14200, Uruguay

Received 15 December 2011; Accepted 20 February 2012

Academic Editor: Yongwimon Lenbury

Copyright © 2012 I. Bazan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

To achieve a precise noninvasive temperature estimation, inside patient tissues, would open promising research fields, because its clinic results would provide early-diagnosis tools. In fact, detecting changes of thermal origin in ultrasonic echo spectra could be useful as an early complementary indicator of infections, inflammations, or cancer. But the effective clinic applications to diagnosis of thermometry ultrasonic techniques, proposed previously, require additional research. Before their implementations with ultrasonic probes and real-time electronic and processing systems, rigorous analyses must be still made over transient echotraces acquired from well-controlled biological and computational phantoms, to improve resolutions and evaluate clinic limitations. It must be based on computing improved signal-processing algorithms emulating tissues responses. Some related parameters in echo-traces reflected by semiregular scattering tissues must be carefully quantified to get a precise processing protocols definition. In this paper, approaches for non-invasive spectral ultrasonic detection are analyzed. Extensions of author's innovations for ultrasonic thermometry are shown and applied to computationally modeled echotraces from scattered biological phantoms, attaining high resolution (better than 0.1°C). Computer methods are provided for viability evaluation of thermal estimation from echoes with distinct noise levels, difficult to be interpreted, and its effectiveness is evaluated as possible diagnosis tool in scattered tissues like liver.