Dear colleagues,

We would like to draw your attention to the upcoming 4th International Workshop on Medical Ultrasound Tomography (MUST) to be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 10-12, 2024. Please find the invitation and call for abstracts below.

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It is our great pleasure to announce the 4th International Workshop on Medical Ultrasound Tomography (MUST) which will take place on June 10-12, 2024 at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The plenary speakers will be Yonina Eldar (WIS), Ben Cox (UCL), Christian Böhm (ETH) and Richard Lopata (TU/e).

MUST brings together research groups from around the globe that are engaged in the development of ultrasound tomography (UST) – an emerging medical imaging technique with immense clinical potential. The workshop is designed to be interactive and intimate, allowing for discussion, exchange of new ideas and fostering collaboration between researchers working on all parts of the development chain of UST, from mathematical modeling over image reconstruction, processing and analysis to instrumentation, clinical applications and commercialization.

The call for submissions (oral or poster presentations) is now open. Abstracts can be submitted until March 1, 2024 via the website, which also contains further information about MUST:

https://indico.scc.kit.edu/event/3830/

On behalf of the organization committee,
Felix Lucka, Tristan van Leeuwen, Hans-Martin Schwab & Chris de Korte

Dear Colleagues,

This year’s deadline for submitting abstracts to the next SPIE conference on Medical Imaging is right around the corner.

We would like to invite you to submit an abstract to the conference on Ultrasonic Imaging and Tomography. This conference provides a forum for in-depth discussions related to medical ultrasound engineering, imaging and clinical applications.

Submissions are due on August 10 and the call for abstracts can be found at the following link

https://spie.org/MI23/conferencedetails/ultrasonic-imaging

Best wishes!

We are happy to announce the release of a new dataset on the USCT data exchange and collaboration platform! The new dataset has been acquired with the new KIT 3D USCT III system, which is currently being commissioned and tested. For a brief system description and for data access please visit the following page: Data access – KIT 3D USCT

Superior to the previous 3D USCT II system, the new dataset contains considerably lower frequency content and has been acquired with a pseudo-randomly sampled aperture with considerably better coverage and better illumination of the region of interest. Please note that a new data interface is provided, which is compatible with the new data format. Should you have any questions when using the data, do not hesitate to contact the KIT USCT group.

We would like to kindly remind you of the upcoming deadline for submission of field reports on August 25, 2019 for the USCT data challenge 2019. Participants are encouraged to send field reports (see here) by e-mail to must-workshop@ipe.kit.edu. Please contact us if you are planning for a late submission.

As part of the 2nd International Workshop on Medical Ultrasound Tomography (MUST), we are happy to announce a new data challenge using synthetic data from numerical breast phantoms. To foster the exchange of knowledge and reproducible science, several research groups have joined forces to create a blind test with freely available synthetic USCT data.

We invite all participants to benchmark different imaging algorithms in terms of the quality of the reconstruction and computational efficiency. This will enable the USCT community to collect best practices and relevant background information on various imaging techniques.

Further information on participation and data access can be found here:
https://ipeusctdb1.ipe.kit.edu/~usct/challenge/?page_id=23

The extended deadline for the submission of field reports is August 25, 2019. Please kindly let us know by July 25, 2019 (regular deadline for abstracts) if you are planning to submit a report.

From 16 – 21 February 2019 San Diego hosted the SPIE Medical Imaging conference. On Sunday, 17 February, a panel discussion about the USCT data challenge 2019 took place. A short report of the panel discussion is available here.

Also on Sunday, 17 February, Rehman Ali from Stanford University (USA) presented his work on “Open-source Gauss-Newton-based methods for refraction-corrected ultrasound computed tomography”. We would like to share that the code was released open source on github at https://github.com/rehmanali1994/refractionCorrectedUSCT.github.io

Dear friends and supporters of the USCT data exchange and collaboration project,

Please take note of the upcoming event:

USCT Data Challenge 2019 and Panel Discussion at the SPIE Medical Imaging meeting in San Diego (https://spie.org/MI19/special-events/Technical-Event)
on Sunday, February 17, 5:45 to 7:45 pm.

We would like to introduce and kick-off a new USCT Data Challenge with synthetic waveform data using numerical phantoms. In this panel, we discuss how to objectively evaluate and compare reconstruction algorithms and imaging protocols as well as the acquisition systems included in the data challenge and data access.

All interested researchers are invited to benchmark different imaging algorithms in terms of the quality of the reconstruction and computational efficiency in a blind test. This will enable the USCT community to collect best practices and relevant background information on various imaging techniques.

The results of the USCT Data Challenge 2019 will be presented at the 2nd International Workshop on Medical Ultrasound Tomography (MUST) in Detroit in Fall 2019.

We hope to see many of you there.

Best regards,
the USCT data exchange and collaboration team

From 25 June to 29 June 2018 the workshop on “Image Reconstruction from Millimetres to the Globe” was held in Leiden, Netherlands (https://www.lorentzcenter.nl/lc/web/2018/984/info.php3?wsid=984). The aim was bringing together researchers from the communities of medical and seismic imaging to explore the extent to which existing solutions and technologies can be transferred.

During the “2-minute madness” on Monday and the following poster session Naiara Korta Martiartu from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, presented results of the reconstructions of 2D and 3D datasets provided on the USCT data exchange and collaboration platform. The authors also compare different reconstruction methods for speed of sound and reflectivity reconstructions.

On Friday Nicole Ruiter (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany) and Christian Böhm (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) presented platforms for knowledge exchange and collaborations and encouraged participants to apply their image reconstruction methods on the provided data. Furthermore a discussion on extending the plattform with simulated data was launched and Christian Böhm pointed out the possibilities offered by collaboration and tutorial platforms like CodeOcean (https://codeocean.com/) and platforms using Jupyter Notebook (http://jupyter.org/).

Dear subscribers of the USCT reference database,

as follow up of the panel discussion at SPIE Medical Imaging 2018 we included a “knowledge base” to the USCT reference website. These wiki like websites allow editing for everybody. Initially we included some first pieces of information on data formats and USCT phantoms. Please check it out and extend to share your knowledge:

https://ipeusctdb1.ipe.kit.edu/~usct/challenge/?incsub_wiki=knowledge-base

If you have questions or encounter problems or bugs during our post please let us know at Torsten.Hopp@kit.edu)

(Please check the disclaimer of the website before posting.)

At SPIE Medical Imaging 2018 on 14^th February 2018 a second panel discussion took place. The panelists and the audience discussed possible standardized formats for USCT data, well defined phantom and simulated data for inclusion in the USCT reference database and best options for a future challenge. A detailed summary of the discussion is now available here.