3D Gynecology Ultrasound Exam

Audio/Video Link For more info on this topic check out Dr. Londoo's lecture from Medison's "Premier Evening" at FIGO 2000
*requires RealPlayer - free download

Terry Dubose:  “We’re at FIGO in Washington, D.C. and we have with us Dr. Jorge Londono from Tampa, Florida.  Tell us about the kind of clinic you work in.”

Dr. Jorge Londoo:  “Thank you very much.  I’m actually working right now with the University of South Florida and I’m a part of a clinic in the obstetrics-gynecology department that’s called Image Based Gynecology.  That’s basically what we do, we do image based gynecology because we think that ultrasound is the best tool available for any gynecologist to practice.”

Terry Dubose:  “You’re using a unique process for ultrasound by doing three-dimensional orthogonal exams.  Can you tell us how this is better than the traditional two-dimensional exam?”

Dr. Jorge Londoo:  “What we have with this new and very unique technology, the three-dimensional ultrasound, is actually that you have all the advantages of the 2D ultrasound but actually instead of saving frames, pixels, and if your lucky saving video tapes and still images, what you’re doing is you’re archiving 3D volumes which is like taking all these pieces of information from the patient and putting it in an area of digital media.”

Terry Dubose:  “So you can take that and look at it from three different planes and get a comprehensive view of not only the surface but the internal textures and the changes there.”

Dr. Jorge Londoo:  “I think there’s a misunderstanding in the general population about 3D ultrasound.  I think people think that 3D ultrasound is a complete baby, but actually it’s much more then that as you mentioned.  We acquired this image, this volume and then when you have this volume in the digital format you can send it to your hardware in the ultrasound or DICOM to an Internet device that you have.  But this information can be analyzed for any single plane point of view and actually this is called voxels - volume pixels so you can search any part or angle of the volume pixel.  So even if the patient is gone, you have all the information to concur and analyze every single piece of this volume.”

Terry Dubose:  “I’m very impressed, I think we’re probably just in the infancy of this but even now you’re getting remarkable pictures.  About how long does it take to acquire the volume that you do?”

Dr. Jorge Londoo:  “I’d have to say the technology has changed a lot in the last couple of years, before we needed workstations to put this information in.  Right now it doesn’t take much longer because what you needed to start with was a real good 2D image and that’s something that we already know.  Now this incredible new technology where here you have prisms and bottoms and, yes, getting the right plane that you want to archive that volume that you want, it won’t take me more than five minutes.”

Terry Dubose:  “Five minutes, that’s remarkable.”

Dr. Jorge Londoo:  “That’s in the easiest cases.  I think it’s going to take me a little bit longer to analyze the images in the most difficult cases.  But let’s say you’re going to do a follicle count like in infertility, these patients won’t take more than five minutes; you just image the ovaries and the uterus in less than five minutes.  Actually, the probe is going to be in the patient’s vagina for no more than five minutes, you take the probe out and then you measure any image that you want to and that’s the beauty of this, it’s just pressing a few buttons and getting the same information in a different form.”

Terry Dubose:  “Thank you, Dr. Londono, I believe that it is going to make a huge difference in gynecologic exams with ultrasound.  Thank you very much.”

Dr. Jorge Londoo:  “Thank you very much.”