Abstract :
The Administrative Committee announces that Dr. Frank E. Barber has been designated the third National Lecturer for the IEEE Sonics and Ultrasonics Group. As such Dr. Barber will be available to speak before SU Chapters, graduate and undergraduate student university seminars, and other appropriate local interest groups. Dr. Barber\´s topic for these talks will be Ultrasonics in Medical Diagnosis and Biomedical Research. An abstract of his talk follows: "Physicians in radiology and other medical specialties have adopted ultrasonic imagiansg a primary means of diagnosis, sometimes in place of more hazardous X-ray and nuclear scans, but more often because of the unique information that can bes een through the scattering of acoustic radiation. The lecturer will introduce some of the more interesting examples of ultrasonic imaging along with a review of the current utilization of ultrasonics in medicine and medical research. In the past, from sonar to B-scan to real-time, developments in this field have followed the lead of technological advances in other fields. Today, however, ultrasound physicists and engineers are leading the way to new technologies with requirements, and opportunities, for innovation in transducer design, signal processing, image synthesis, and image processing and pattern recognition. While the opportunities exist, the inherent limitations are not well understood. New information is obtained by opening up both the temporal and spatial bandwidth of any system but only up to certain limits imposed by Mother Nature. With today\´s systems, ultrasound frequency and transducer aperture are limited by the innovation of the designer. Large area arrays and multifrequency arrays will create the waves of the future. Currently phase information is discarded, except in Doppler systems, and it is felt by some that a major opportunitlyie s there. On the other hand severe limitations result from distortions in the ultrasonic beams as they travel from transducer, - hrough the body to the site being imaged, and back again. These distortions, and noise, severely strain the imagination of any designer. The opportunities and inherent sources of uncertainty will be the major subject of this presentation."
