Echography and ultrasound allow us to see inside our bodies
in the exact same way that we see the outside world.
It’s the human body on television.
THE ULTRASONIC REVOLUTION
Ultrasonography consists in transmitting ultrasonic waves inside the body.
These waves propagate in the tissues
and a small fraction of the wave is reflected by small scatterers
which send this echo back, hence the name echography,
and this backward-traveling wave is captured by an ultrasonic probe
which records this signal
and sends it to an electronic machine which displays the image to us.
MICKAËL TANTER, DIRECTOR OF THE TEAM “WAVES PHYSICS FOR MEDICINE”
There are many applications of ultrasound in the field of medicine.
First of all, there are imaging techniques
allowing to either screen or diagnose diseases.
There are also therapeutic applications. We can now treat the human body remotely
without opening it. It is known as non-invasive surgery.
And then, there is also the creation of smart sensors using ultrasound.
Tiny sensors that are attached to the body make measurements in real time.
These ultrasound-based systems
are dedicated to three major areas in medicine:
cancer diagnosis applications, cardiovascular applications
and neuroscience applications.
Our team is made of about fifty people.
They are mostly physicists
whose culture is really to bring their fundamental experiments
from the laboratory bench to a bedside device
that will be used in clinics
on patients for medical diagnosis or therapy.
Over the past twenty years, our laboratory has surpassed
the two fundamental barriers of ultrasound imaging:
the temporal resolution,
which we have increased from 50 to 10,000 frames per second of the human body
and the spatial resolution, which we have improved from 0.2-0.3 mm to a few microns
with ultrasound deep microscopy of the human body.
A wide range of applications will result from this.
One of the first resulting applications
is the imaging of the human body’s stiffness
which is already used clinically, but there are new applications
such as the creation of portable systems
able to see cerebral activity using ultrasound,
systems that can deliver drugs remotely
or even create these drugs directly inside the tumor,
portable systems that can look at the heart’s activity and functions,
systems that are also able to treat heart valves without opening the patient
and many other projects which we hope will have an important future.
The proximity between physics and medicine,
between a physicist and a clinician,
has always been a fantastic engine in the history of the humankind
A very nice example of the transfer of this academic research
from the lab to the industry
is the ultrasound scanner standing just behind me. This ultrafast ultrasound scanner
was developed by the company Supersonic Imagine
as a result of our laboratory’s work.
And so now we know how to transfer our research to the patient very quickly.
Even though we are far from the patient,
since we invent devices that are used by clinicians to save their patients,
there is a continuum.
I think that all the members on the laboratory came here
because they are moved by this desire, this force, to motivation for inventing things
that will have an impact for saving people.