Cloud-native ultrasound imaging

Introduction

Ultrasound (US) can revolutionize and democratize medical imaging if it offers:

1. Access for everyone, and
2. Excellent image quality, always.

MRI offers excellent image quality but is expensive and will thus not likely be able to provide access for everyone. Low-cost US hardware will enable access in the future but is not expected to yield the needed breakthrough for excellent image quality. Any solution that addresses both will have a huge impact.

Challenges in Image Quality

The biggest adversaries for US image quality stem from patient- and user-specific factors. I therefore strongly believe that achieving excellent image quality requires closed-loop, goal-directed imaging through systems that actively pursue information gain in-situ.

Project Overview

My ERC stg project “US-ACT” develops this new closed-loop US paradigm, with deep generative models governing beliefs about anatomy and function. This, however, gives rise to a new dilemma:

• How to embrace high-performant, but complex, algorithms to achieve excellent image quality, while at the same time lowering cost to achieve access for everyone?

Our recent result shows that US-ACT enables breaking the cost-complexity trade-off through a new approach that is rooted in the closed-loop proposition itself.

Proposed Solution: CloudSound

I propose CloudSound, a fully cloud-native US imaging paradigm, unlocking access to virtually unlimited computational power, memory, and storage for raw US sensor data.

We will move all the computational complexity away from the local device to a remote server. To achieve this with minimal latency and high frame rates, CloudSound introduces a new holistic rate control strategy for the entire transmit-receive scheme, based on algorithms developed in US-ACT. This will drive rate control of the full solution under a time-varying information bottleneck: the network channel.

Conclusion

Ultimately, CloudSound will disrupt ultrasound business models and unlock unprecedented image quality and ease of use, making advanced medical imaging affordable and globally accessible.