The System Over the past five years, Pierson has put together a computer-based system in which preprocessed ultrasound images are acquired by a digital acquisition system as they stream off the digital scan connector within the ultrasound device. To analyze the data, Pierson and his team use PV-WAVE , a VDA package from Visual Numerics, Inc. of Houston, Texas. You can flip up an image and make a diagnosis very quickly. The Application Researchers at the University's College of Medicine are using the system in several applications. By studying computerized images of ovarian follicles, for example, they are learning to tell good follicles from bad.
Good follicles contain a visible egg and are likely to perform their proper physiologic function.
This increases the success rates for conception. Alternatively, researchers also want to understand how to turn the egg-producing mechanism off for contraceptive purposes. Another very promising area is cancer research. When Pierson and his team turned their equipment to study ovarian tumors, they realized that the visual data analysis could help them diagnose whether a cyst or tumor is malignant or benign based on a computer analysis of its structure. This insight quickly spread to an interdisciplinary research project to verify the findings.