# Academic-Industrial Partnership for Translation of Acoustic Angiography

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIV OF NORTH CAROLINA CHAPEL HILL · 2024 · $80,870

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
We aim to renew a highly productive collaboration that has developed revolutionary new ultrasound imaging
hardware and processing approaches. Our innovative technologies have enabled high-signal-to-noise and high-
resolution contrast-enhanced microvascular imaging. Specifically, we developed the world’s first ultra-broadband
co-axial dual-frequency linear arrays, which enable transmission of ultrasound at low frequencies and reception
of high-frequency content from microbubbles well beyond their 7th harmonic. These transducers enable
superharmonic imaging, which provides high-resolution contrast images of the microvasculature with essentially
no tissue background and is used for visualizing vessels on the order of 100 microns in both animal and human
tissues. Significantly, we have utilized these tools to image microvascular angiogenesis, known for decades to
be a biomarker of cancer, yet not previously possible to image directly with ultrasound. Our ‘acoustic
angiography’ imaging readily shows drastic differences in microvasculature density and structure between
malignant cancers and healthy tissue, providing superior sensitivity and specificity to early micro-breast tumors
in mice genetically predisposed to breast cancer. Furthermore, our excellent superharmonic signal separation
enables super-resolution imaging without the cumbersome spatiotemporal filtering approaches otherwise used
for this process, which are readily corrupted by tissue motion or slow flow. Our next generation approach will
enable outstanding microvascular resolution (<100 um) in deep tissue (4-8 cm), despite slow microvascular flow,
and with robustness to tissue motion. Despite our advances in hardware and imaging techniques, challenges
remain to make our technology optimal for imaging human cancers. The shallow focal depth of the arrays
designed in the prior project period, limited by prototype array and lens designs, and carried over from their
original small-animal imaging applications, is far from optimized for the 3-4 cm depth needed to image suspicious
breast lesions in humans. In this renewal, we will direct the development and optimization of dual-frequency
arrays specifically for deeper clinical imaging (targeting depths up to 8cm). Our loss in resolution due to lower
frequency bandwidths will be recovered by superharmonic super-resolution processing. We have demonstrated
this approach with excellent results using the prototype dual frequency arrays, enabling recovery of sub-100
micron resolution, even with frequencies that can penetrate 6-8 cm. Furthermore, since microvascular imaging
provides the most diagnostic information when acquired in 3D, we will develop the first dual-frequency 2D arrays.
Successful completion of these aims will advance ultrasound imaging closer to a practical clinical modality for
identifying and assessing angiogenic and molecular biomarkers of cancer with high specificity and sensitivity for
future applications such as di...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10977293
- **Project number:** 3R01CA189479-08S1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIV OF NORTH CAROLINA CHAPEL HILL
- **Principal Investigator:** Paul A Dayton
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $80,870
- **Award type:** 3
- **Project period:** 2014-09-04 → 2026-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10977293

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10977293, Academic-Industrial Partnership for Translation of Acoustic Angiography (3R01CA189479-08S1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10977293. Licensed CC0.

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