A breakthrough in ultrasound technology has just made imaging easier and simpler for doctors. The technology called cSound was developed by the US-based GE Healthcare.
The software based ultrasound produces ‘exquisite’ images of the human body in 4D- three spatial dimensions and time, almost as if the doctors are seeing the organs outside the body. The technology which was launched worldwide in 2015, would soon be available in India, informed the company.
Ultrasound technology has been popular today because of the precise pictures it produces. With cSound technology, the images produced will have the additional benefit of being in real time says Dr Partho Sengupta, Associate Professor, Medicine and cardiology, Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, US. The images of human heart’s chambers, valves, vessels are so real that the doctor almost “sees the patient’s heart beating outside the body in all dimensions,” he says.
While conventional ultra sound systems rely on hardware based technology, these can support only limited set of information and the results are inconclusive. cSound system, on the otherhand, is software based and flexible for different patient types and procedures. The system stores infinite amount of data and the algorithms select the most relevant data to show.
Most cardiology procedures today are catheter based unlike open-heart surgeries decades ago. “We need better imaging technology that shows images in real dimension and real time when we are doing catheter based procedures and cSound technology helps us do that,” says Dr Bijoy Khanderia, Director Echocardiography, Aurora Healthcare Milwaukee and Professor at Wisconsin Mediacal College, US. “Better images means the doctors will be able to make better decisions,” he says. Both Sengupta and Khanderia were in India to speak about the technology and spoke to THE WEEK on phone.
Dr Tilak Suvarna, Senior Interventional Cardiologist, Head Department of Cardiology, Asian Heart Institute, Mumbai says, “We will get better images of obese patients and those with lung disease with the technology.” Not just in cardiology, cSound technology will be useful in different procedures and specialities like treating prostrate disease, says Dr Vijay Surase, Interventional Cardiologist, Jupiter Hospital, Thane. “It will help us in treatment of valves and defining date and time of the valve replacement procedures,” he says. Surase says their hospital will soon get the technology along with a few others in Mumbai.
