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Ultrasound uses sound waves to make live pictures; it is cheap, safe, and used to guide needles into lumps.
Ultrasound sends pulses of high-frequency sound into the body and builds an image from echoes reflected at tissue interfaces, while Doppler shows blood flow. It is first-line for breast lumps, thyroid nodules, liver and lymph nodes, and guides most biopsies because it is real-time, portable and free of radiation. Endoscopic ultrasound, with the probe inside the gut, stages pancreatic, oesophageal and rectal cancer and samples lesions that external probes cannot reach. Contrast-enhanced ultrasound and elastography add characterisation of blood flow and tissue stiffness. Its weaknesses are that image quality depends heavily on the operator and that sound cannot pass through bone or air, so lung and skeletal disease need other methods. Ultrasound is the cheap, safe, live imaging that puts the needle in the lump.
Pulse-echo of high-frequency sound; reflection at tissue interfaces builds the image. Doppler shows blood flow.
This is the polyp pathway UK radiologists and surgeons follow (a UK author, Foley, leads it). It is a surveillance-and-surgery guideline built on low to moderate quality evidence, and the Kaiser Permanente cohort published two years earlier questions whether following small polyps finds cancer at all.
The largest natural history study of gallbladder polyps undermines the surveillance half of the 2022 European guideline: small polyps grow as a matter of course and almost never become cancer, while size at first scan carries most of the risk.
Size is a blunt tool: a 10 mm cut-off sends many people with cholesterol polyps to surgery and misses some neoplastic polyps below it. Better imaging (contrast-enhanced or endoscopic ultrasound) or a risk score is the research need the 2022 guideline itself acknowledges.
UK evidence that the polyps found every day on NHS ultrasound lists are almost always benign; it feeds the risk factors used in the 2022 European guideline.
Query for this technology: (TITLE:"ultrasound" OR ABSTRACT:"ultrasound" OR TITLE:"endoscopic ultrasound" OR ABSTRACT:"endoscopic ultrasound") AND (cancer OR tumor OR tumour OR oncology OR carcinoma OR lymphoma OR leukemia OR leukaemia OR myeloma OR sarcoma OR melanoma OR glioma) AND (diagnosis OR biopsy OR screening). Results are unfiltered search hits about Ultrasound, not a curated reading list.
Shares UKCTOCS, HCC surveillance in cirrhosis (ultrasound + AFP), Thyroglobulin, calcitonin and CEA in thyroid cancer follow-up, Low-risk gestational trophoblastic neoplasia (FIGO score 0 to 6).
Shares FUJIFILM Healthcare, Canon Medical Systems, Philips, GE HealthCare.
Shares FUJIFILM Healthcare, Canon Medical Systems, Philips, GE HealthCare.
Shares Replace six-monthly ultrasound with a blood test for liver cancer in cirrhosis, FUJIFILM Healthcare, Canon Medical Systems, HCC surveillance in cirrhosis (ultrasound + AFP).
Shares Canon Medical Systems, Philips, GE HealthCare, Siemens Healthineers.
Shares Polyp size of 1 cm is insufficient to discriminate neoplastic and non-neoplastic gallbladder polyps, Management and follow-up of gallbladder polyps: updated joint guidelines between the ESGAR, EAES, EFISDS and ESGE, Outcomes of Gallbladder Polyps and Their Association With Gallbladder Cancer in a 20-Year Cohort, Gallbladder polyp (polypoid lesion).
Shares Stop biopsying small thyroid nodules and never screen the thyroid, Ultrasound restraint and surveillance to reverse thyroid cancer overdiagnosis, Active surveillance of papillary microcarcinoma, Outcomes of Gallbladder Polyps and Their Association With Gallbladder Cancer in a 20-Year Cohort.
Shares FUJIFILM Healthcare, Elastography and contrast-enhanced ultrasound, GE HealthCare, Siemens Healthineers.
Open-source projects that implement or serve this technology, from OnCo's own catalogue: licence and last activity as the repository reported them on the day of the fetch. Listing is not endorsement; check the licence before reuse and the validation before clinical use.
An open single-element ultrasound imaging board.
Data acquisition and calibration for image-guided interventions (tracking, ultrasound), used with 3D Slicer for navigated biopsy and surgery research.
Open-source software, hardware and data projects catalogued by a third party, the Open Medical Registry, that bear on this technology. Listing is not endorsement; check each project's own licence and validation before clinical use.
Open-source ultrasound processing modules and building blocks, analogue front ends, FPGA acquisition and pulser boards for do-it-yourself echography.
Compact iCE40 FPGA and Raspberry Pi ultrasound board providing pulse-echo acquisition for imaging and non-destructive testing.
Domain Generalization for Prostate Segmentation in Transrectal Ultrasound Images: A Multi-center Study
From the Open Medical Registry (openmedical.sh), an MIT-licensed catalogue of open-source medicine. Blurbs are one line from each registry record; every project keeps its own licence.