Industrial and medical technology are merging at the ISU Center for Nondestructive Evaluation in a joint effort to improve the success of surgical procedures.

ISU researchers are collaborating with the scientists from the University of Iowa to improve four techniques, including X-ray contrast agents, brachytherapy, 3-D ultrasound and intravascular ultrasound imaging.

The techniques are being developed by the Center for Nondestructive Evaluation to decrease recovery time of surgical patients without increasing the invasiveness of procedures.

ISU physicist Joe Gray has developed high-resolution X-ray techniques using computer tomography that can be used with new contrast agents, creating a clearer, more detailed picture.

“Professors and doctors at the University of Iowa are developing alternative contrast agents to be used instead of iodine,” said Gray, adjunct associate professor of mechanical engineering. “If you’ve had a heart attack and need an X-ray, they may inject iodine to make the blood vessel show up better.”

A scanner of such a high resolution used on humans would offer too much data, he said, so they first developed it for evaluation on laboratory animals.

“A typical medical scanner has a resolution of 1 millimeter — we’ve developed one that has a resolution of up to 10 microns, or .01 of a millimeter,” Gray said. “We have to take advantage of smaller objects. Then we can apply it to living tissues, such as a human bone.”

He said his research on this project started about a year and a half ago, but he has been working with high-resolution computer tomography for much longer.

“We can transfer the capabilities we have to other areas,” he said. “In talking with the biomedical imaging people, we can say, ‘Here’s what we can do,’ and they may say, ‘This is what we would really like to do.’ Then we can ask ourselves what we can add to it so that it addresses some medical issue.”

Ron Roberts, adjunct associate professor in the Center for Nondestructive Evaluation, is involved in the research for intravascular ultrasound imaging.

He said he wants to improve the quantitative information produced from instruments to collect ultrasound data.

“We’re interested in the very basic science and what improvements can be made there,” he said. “[The University of Iowa] lets us know what kind of measurements they’ve done that we can work with. They notify us that they have collected data on a series of animals or provide us with a sample of tissue to look at under a microscope.”

Brachytherapy is another project at the Center for Nondestructive Evaluation that involves planting radioactive seeds in the prostate and applying radiation to eliminate tumors. This procedure is related to the fourth research project, adding a third dimension to ultrasound images.

Roberts said he has been communicating and interacting with the University of Iowa for a number of years on his research, but the current project is being supported by a $600,000 gift from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust of Muscatine.