TUFFC News: from the desk of the Editor-in-Chief
This brief review of the IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control, T-UFFC activities covers the highlights of the past few months and indicates that the Transactions are thriving and successfully attracting both high quality contributing and review papers.
Highlights from the past few months
In November of 2019 the Review “Time Delay Estimate Subsample Interpolation in Frequency Domain” by Linas Svilainis scrutinized the dependence of ultrasound achievable resolution on the sampling.
The February 2020 issue presented an elegant review of Doppler ultrasound technology for fetal heart rate (fHR) monitoring, and its critical role in clinical practice by Paul Hamelmann et. al. The review highlighted the importance of cardiotocography and provided a thorough description of the anatomy and physiology of the fetal heart and the surrounding maternal abdomen to facilitate the discussion of the advantages and fundamental limitations (including transducer geometry, Doppler signal processing, and fHR extraction algorithms) of the technology.
March 2020 issue presented a sophisticated update of “Mechanisms of Interaction of Ultrasound with Cancellous Bone” by Keith A. Wear, addressing the growing interest in application of ultrasound technology as an alternative clinically viable tool for diagnosis of osteoporosis.
Special Issues
Several Special Issues of the Transactions are also being finalized, including: Deep learning in medical ultrasound: from image formation to image analysis; Recent advances in ultrasound technology for brain imaging, therapy through neuromodulation and monitoring; Contribution of Women in Ferroelectrics; and Ultrasound-based Elasticity Imaging. In this context it is worth noting that the Transactions acknowledge the need to be extraordinarily agile in order to accelerate the publication of Special Issues. Thus, recognizing the need to address the potential role of ultrasound in abating CoronaVirus-19, the Journal has just released the call for such a special issue, with an extraordinary rapid turnaround time. The Special Issue was announced in the first week of April of 2020, the submission deadline was April 30 and the COVID-19 imaging and diagnosis Issue is anticipated to be published electronically in the summer of 2020.
Such nimble action is in line with the Transactions mission to facilitate and disseminate internationally relevant research, and is especially pertinent at the time of CoronaVirus-19. Here, the Transactions of UFFC provide a rapid and convenient platform able to present ultrasound technology relevant to the COVID-19 research. There is growing evidence that ultrasound imaging can play a major role in facilitating primary diagnosis and in managing the comorbidities of COVID-19 patients. In addition, in recent years, the use of ultrasound imaging in lung diagnostics has also become established, and ultrasound technology has been introduced in emergency medicine and critical care as a point-of-care modality that is versatile, portable, and cost-effective. Since the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak, ultrasound imaging has been deployed as a frontline modality for diagnosing the respiratory health of COVID-19 patients. With the expanding role of ultrasound imaging in lung diagnostics, concomitant needs have arisen in technological research and development to devise new algorithms and hardware to enhance ultrasound imaging’s diagnostic value in lung clinics and in COVID-19 patient management. Hence, for completeness, the special topic of front-end beamforming and general lung ultrasound studies – specifically, the reconstruction methods for lung ultrasonography - was also included in the Special Issue.
Working to Keep the Journal Thriving
We would like to acknowledge the service of all of our talented, vigorous, enthusiastic and industrious Associate Editors and Contributors. We are also assiduously looking for feedback from our readers in addressing new challenges and opportunities to solidify the UFFC Transactions’ reputation and impact. Our goal is to make the UFFC Transactions the publication vehicle of choice for our ever-growing interdisciplinary readership.
We are confident that our pro-active future selection of the topics of the review papers and Special Issues planning will bear fruit and be beneficial in our perseverance to contribute to the Society, especially to preserve our scholastic mission and to bolster our future.