Nico de Jong

Erasmus University Rotterdam | EUR · Erasmus Medical Center (MC)

Superheated nanodroplets (NDs) were recently proposed for in vivo proton range verification, owing to their ability to vaporize into echogenic microbubbles (MBs) upon exposure to ionizing radiation. In a previous publication, vaporization events were detected with 2D Ultrasound Localization Microscopy (ULM) based on a pulse-echo method. Here, we in...

Funding Acknowledgements Type of funding sources: None. Introduction Echo-Particle Image Velocimetry (echoPIV) tracks speckle patterns from ultrasound contrast agent (UCA) microbubbles injected intravenously, being less angle-sensitive than colour Doppler. One limitation of conventional echoPIV is the inability to accurately resolve high velocitie...

Funding Acknowledgements Type of funding sources: Public Institution(s). Main funding source(s): Research Foundation Flanders (FWO grant number 1211620N) & TTW-Dutch Heart Foundation partnership program "Early recognition of cardiovascular diseases" (project number 14740) Background Acoustic radiation force-based shear wave elastography (SWE) is a...

Transcranial ultrasound imaging (TUI) is a diagnostic modality with numerous applications, but unfortunately, it is hindered by phase aberration caused by the skull. In this article, we propose to reconstruct a transcranial B-mode image with a refraction-corrected synthetic aperture imaging (SAI) scheme. First, the compressional sound velocity of t...

In recent years, several fitting techniques have been presented to reconstruct the parameters of a plate from its Lamb wave dispersion curves. Published studies show that these techniques can yield high accuracy results and have the potential of reconstructing several parameters at once. The precision with which parameters can be reconstructed by i...

An in vivo range verification technology for proton beam cancer therapy, preferably in real-time and with submillimeter resolution, is desired to reduce the present uncertainty in dose localization. Acoustical imaging technologies exploiting possible local interactions between protons and microbubbles or nanodroplets might be an interesting option....

Phospholipid-coated targeted microbubbles are used for ultrasound molecular imaging and locally enhanced drug delivery, with the binding efficacy being an important trait. The use of organic solvent in microbubble production makes the difference between a heterogeneous or homogeneous ligand distribution. This study demonstrates the effect of ligand...

The potential of proton therapy to improve the conformity of the delivered dose to the tumor volume is currently limited by range uncertainties. Injectable superheated nanodroplets have recently been proposed for ultrasound-based in vivo range verification, as these vaporize into echogenic microbubbles on proton irradiation. In previous studies, of...

Bacterial biofilms are a huge burden on our healthcare systems worldwide. The lack of specificity in diagnostic and treatment possibilities result in difficult-to-treat and persistent infections. The aim of this in vitro study was to investigate if microbubbles targeted specifically to bacteria in biofilms could be used both for diagnosis as well f...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Superheated nanodroplets were proposed for dosimetry in proton therapy. Proton energy deposition within the droplet core leads to droplet vaporization. Vaporizations can be localized through acoustic pulse-echo, and used to measure the proton stopping distribution. Since protons can only lead to vaporizations as they stop,...

Abstrac: Acute normovolemic hemodilution (ANH) is associated with low oxygen carrying capacity of blood and purposed to cause renal injury in perioperative setting. It is best accomplished in a perioperative setting by a colloid such as hydroxyl ethyl starch (HES) due its capacity to fill the vascular compartment and maintain colloidal pressure. H...

Shear wave elastography (SWE) has the potential to determine cardiac tissue stiffness from non-invasive shear wave speed measurements, important, e.g., for predicting heart failure. Previous studies showed that waves traveling in the interventricular septum (IVS) may display Lamb-like dispersive behaviour, introducing a thickness-frequency dependen...

This article presents an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designed for intra-vascular ultrasound imaging that interfaces 64 piezoelectric transducer elements to an imaging system using a single micro-coaxial cable. Thus, it allows a single-element transducer to be replaced by a transducer array to enable 3-D imaging. The 1.5-mm-diamet...

Volumetric ultrasound imaging of blood flow with microbubbles enables more complete visualization of the microvasculature. Sparse arrays are ideal candidates to perform volumetric imaging at reduced manufacturing complexity and cable count. However, due to the small number of transducer elements, sparse arrays often come with high clutter levels, e...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Targeted microbubbles are currently regarded as objects attached to the outside of the endothelial cell membrane; nonetheless our study shows that microbubbles targeted to the angiogenic biomarker αvβ3 were fully engulfed by the human umbilical vein endothelial cells, while those targeted to the endothelial biomarker CD31...

In the above article [1] , the authors regret that there was a mistake in calculating the mol% of the microbubble coating composition used. For all experiments, the unit in mg/mL was utilized and the conversion mistake only came when converting to mol% in order to define the ratio between the coating formulation components. The correct molecular...

Skeletal muscles generate force, enabling movement through a series of fast electromechanical activations coordinated by the central nervous system. Understanding the underlying mechanism of such fast muscle dynamics is essential in neuromuscular diagnostics, rehabilitation medicine and sports biomechanics. The unique combination of electromyograph...

High frame rate (HFR) echo-particle image velocimetry (echoPIV) is a promising tool for measuring intracardiac blood flow dynamics. In this study we investigate the optimal ultrasound contrast agent (UCA: SonoVue®) infusion rate and acoustic output to use for HFR echoPIV (PRF = 4900 Hz) in the left ventricle (LV) of patients. Three infusion rates (...

In the above article [1] , the authors regret that there was a mistake in calculating the mol% of the microbubble coating composition. For all experiments, the unit in mg/mL was utilized and the conversion mistake only came when converting to mol% in order to define the ratio between the coating formulation components. The correct molecular weigh...

In the above article [1] , the authors regret that there was a mistake in calculating the mol% of the microbubble coating composition. For all experiments, the unit in mg/mL was utilized and the conversion mistake only came when converting to mol% in order to define the ratio between the coating formulation components. The correct molecular weigh...

Background and Aim: Newborns needing major surgical intervention are at risk of brain injury and impaired neurodevelopment later in life. Disturbance of cerebral perfusion might be an underlying factor. This study investigates the feasibility of serial transfontanellar ultrasound measurements of the pial arteries during neonatal surgery, and whethe...

Collateral damage to healthy surrounding tissue during conventional radiotherapy increases when deviations from the treatment plan occur. Ultrasound contrast agents (UCAs) are a possible candidate for radiation dose monitoring. This study investigated the size distribution and acoustic response of two commercial formulations, SonoVue/Lumason and De...

The authors regret that there was a mistake in calculating the mol% of the microbubble coating composition used. For all experiments the unit in mg/ml was utilized and the conversion mistake only came when converting to mol% in order to define the ratio between the coating formulation components. The correct molecular weight of PEG‐40 stearate is 2...

The chicken embryo and the blood-vessel rich chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) is a valuable in vivo model to investigate biomedical processes, new ultrasound pulsing schemes, or novel transducers for contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging and microbubble-mediated drug delivery. The reasons for this are the accessibility of the embryo and vessel network...

Simultaneous visualization of the teeth and periodontium is of significant clinical interest for image-based monitoring of periodontal health. We recently reported the application of a dual-modality photoacoustic-ultrasound (PA-US) imaging system for resolving periodontal anatomy and periodontal pocket depths in humans. This work utilized a linear...

Funding Acknowledgements Type of funding sources: Private grant(s) and/or Sponsorship. Main funding source(s): Research Foundation Flanders (FWO): grant 1211620N TTW – Dutch Heart Foundation partnership program "Earlier recognition of cardiovascular diseases": project number 14740 Background Echocardiographic shear wave elastography (SWE) encompas...

Phospholipid-coated microbubbles are ultrasound contrast agents that can be employed for ultrasound molecular imaging and drug delivery. For safe and effective implementation, microbubbles must respond uniformly and predictably to ultrasound. Therefore, we investigated how lipid handling and phase distribution affected the variability in the acoust...

This paper presents an ultrasound transceiver application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) directly integrated with an array of 12 × 80 piezoelectric transducer elements to enable next-generation ultrasound probes for 3D carotid artery imaging. The ASIC, implemented in a 0.18 µm high-voltage Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (HV BCD) process, adopted a programma...

In the above article [1] , we mentioned that the superposition of the different symmetric (S) modes in the frequencywavenumber (f-k) domain results in a high-intensity region where its slope corresponds to the longitudinal wave speed in the slab. However, we have recently understood that this highintensity region belongs to the propagation of a w...

jats:title>Abstract Natural and active shear wave elastography (SWE) are potential ultrasound-based techniques to non-invasively assess myocardial stiffness, which could improve current diagnosis of heart failure. This study aims to bridge the knowledge gap between both techniques and discuss their respective impacts on cardiac stiffness evaluation...

No PDF available ABSTRACT In nondestructive testing, the generation of higher harmonics and the mixing of elastic waves are used to measure the nonlinearity parameters, which in turn are closely related to the microscopic state of the material. A 3-D numerical tool that can simulate large scale, four-dimensional, nonlinear elastic wavefields would...

Background: Shear waves are generated by the closure of the heart valves. Significant differences in shear wave velocity have been found recently between normal myocardium and disease models of diffusely increased muscle stiffness. In this study we correlate in vivo myocardial shear wave imaging (SWI) with presence of scarred tissue, as model for...

Recently, we realized a prototype matrix transducer consisting of 48 rows of 80 elements on top of a tiled set of Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) implementing a row-level control connecting one transmit/receive channel to an arbitrary subset of elements per row. A fully sampled array data acquisition is implemented by a column-by-c...

Transit-time ultrasonic flow meters are widely used in industry to measure fluid flow. In practice ultrasonic flow meters either show a zero-flow error or suffer from a significant random error due to a limited signal-to-noise ratio, requiring a significant amount of averaging to achieve good precision. This work presents a method that minimizes th...

Phase aberration in transcranial ultrasound imaging (TUI) caused by the human skull leads to an inaccurate image reconstruction. In this paper, we present a novel method for estimating speed of sound and an adaptive beamforming technique for phase aberration correction in a flat polyvinylchloride (PVC) slab as a model for the human skull. First, th...

Ultrasound insonification of microbubbles can locally enhance drug delivery, but the microbubble-cell interaction remains poorly understood. Because intracellular calcium (Cai2+) is a key cellular regulator, unraveling the Cai2+ fluctuations caused by an oscillating microbubble provides crucial insight into the underlying bio-effects. Therefore, we...

Shear wave elastography (SWE) might allow non-invasive assessment of cardiac stiffness by relating shear wave propagation speed to material properties. However, after aortic valve closure, when natural shear waves occur in the septal wall, the stiffness of the muscle decreases significantly, and the effects of such temporal variation of medium prop...

Ultrasound insonification of microbubbles can locally increase vascular permeability to enhance drug delivery. To control and optimize the therapeutic potential, we need to better understand the underlying biological mechanisms of the drug delivery pathways. The aim of this in vitro study was to elucidate the microbubble-endothelial cell interactio...

Shear wave speed measurements can potentially be used to non-invasively measure myocardial stiffness in order to assess myocardial function. Several studies showed the feasibility of tracking natural mechanical waves induced by aortic valve closure in the interventricular septum, but different echocardiographic views have been used. This work syste...

Background Shear waves (SW) are induced in the myocardium by the closure of the valves. Recent studies show variations in their propagation velocity with age, gender or pathology. However, these valve-induced waves occur during relaxation and contraction. This means that the instantaneous SW velocity, as measure for stiffness, might not only depend...

Left ventricular (LV) blood flow is an inherently complex time-varying 3-D phenomenon, where 2-D quantification often ignores the effect of out-of-plane motion. In this study, we describe high frame rate 4-D echocardiographic particle image velocimetry (echo-PIV) using a prototype matrix transesophageal transducer and a dynamic LV phantom for testi...

Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) is an emerging label-free and non-invasive modality for imaging biological tissues. PAI has been implemented in different configurations, one of which is photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) with a potential wide range of applications, including brain and breast imaging. Hemispherical Array PACT (HA-PACT) is a variat...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Clamp-on flow meters need a-priori knowledge of pipe geometry and material properties for their operation. Estimation of these properties may limit the accuracy of flow measurements. We are currently investigating the use of clamp-on flow meters based on matrix transducer arrays. Besides the benefits for flow measurement,...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Shear Wave Elastography (SWE) has been proposed to investigate cardiac health by non-invasively monitoring tissue stiffness. Previous work has shown that the plate-like geometry of the Interventricular Septum (IVS) may result in a dispersion similar to Lamb waves, complicating the link between shear wave speed and cardiac...

No PDF available ABSTRACT In nondestructive testing, nonlinear wave mixing could be used to obtain the nonlinearity parameters of an elastic medium and thereby get information about its state, e.g., aging and fatigue. To better understand the mixing mechanisms and optimize the design of measurement setups, a physics-oriented tool for the simulation...

Current methods to track the progression and evaluate treatment of muscular dystrophies are scarce. The electromechanical delay (EMD), defined as the time lag from muscle electrical activity to motion onset, has been proposed as a biomarker, but provides only limited insight in the pathophysiology of muscle function. This work proposes and evaluate...

The introduction of sophisticated, nonlinear elastic wave propagation theory as the basis of measurement techniques and for the interpretation of experimental results should be accompanied by the development of an accurate numerical method that can evaluate the wavefield (displacement). This work is concerned with the formulation, implementation, a...

For the quantification of myocardial function, myocardial stiffness can potentially be measured non-invasively using shear wave elastography. Clinical diagnosis requires high precision. In 10 healthy volunteers, we studied the reproducibility of the measurement of propagation speeds of shear waves induced by aortic and mitral valve closure (AVC, MV...

This paper quantitatively analyzes the impact of bit errors in digitized RF data on ultrasound image quality. The quality of B-mode images in both linear and phased array imaging is evaluated by means of three objective image quality metrics: peak signal-to-noise ratio, structural similarity index and contrast-to-noise ratio, when bit errors are in...

In acoustic‐resolution photoacoustic microscopy (AR‐PAM) systems, the lateral resolution in the focal zone of the ultrasound (US) transducer is determined by the numerical aperture (NA) of the transducer. To have a high lateral resolution, a large NA is used. However, the larger the NA, the smaller the depth of focus (DOF). As a result, the lateral...

Controlling microbubble-mediated drug delivery requires the underlying biological and physical mechanisms to be unraveled. To image both microbubble oscillation upon ultrasound insonification and the resulting cellular response, we developed an optical imaging system that can achieve the necessary nanosecond temporal and nanometer spatial resolutio...