Congratulations to Marie Muller, Ph.D., Associate Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at North Carolina State University, and Jonathan Mamou, Ph.D., Professor of Electrical Engineering in Radiology at Weill Cornell Medicine, on receiving a $2.65 million NIH R01 grant, "Quantitative Ultrasound for Interstitial Lung Diseases."
Since conventional ultrasound cannot quantitatively assess the severity of pulmonary edema and fibrosis, Dr. Muller, the grant’s contact PI, and Dr. Mamou aim to develop quantitative ultrasound methods to evaluate pulmonary edema severity in heart failure patients while monitoring their response to diuretic treatment. Drs. Muller and Mamou will also investigate whether these methods can assess the severity of pulmonary fibrosis.
"Currently, expert clinicians use visible artifacts in lung ultrasound images to diagnose interstitial lung diseases, but studies have demonstrated that these artifacts can depend on ultrasound imaging settings and that their interpretation can be subjective,” says Dr. Mamou. “In this project, in close collaboration with Dr. Muller, we will not completely forgo imaging but rather directly use ultrasound data to measure a wide range of lung-quantitative ultrasound (LQUS) parameters associated with lung microstructure, which are user and system-independent. We hypothesize that these LQUS parameters will permit sensitive and specific diagnosis of interstitial lung diseases."
Historically, lung diseases, including pulmonary edema and fibrosis, are diagnosed and monitored using chest X-rays, CT scans, and invasive pulmonary function tests. However, these costly imaging methods expose patients to ionizing radiation, have high inter-observer variability, and are impractical for frequent monitoring. Pulmonary function tests are effort-dependent and can be affected by coughing or shortness of breath; this highlights the need for a real-time, point-of-care, non-ionizing, and noninvasive method for quantitatively monitoring pulmonary edema.
"Ultrasound propagation in lungs is a complicated acoustic phenomenon because air sacs are strong scatterers of ultrasound," says Dr. Jonathan Mamou. "In this project, we will instead use sophisticated physics-based approaches capable of elegantly quantifying single and multiple scattering to yield LQUS biomarkers associated with the lung microstructure and, in particular, air content. LQUS parameters are therefore likely to carry valuable diagnosis information."