Pengfei Song: Improving Ultrasound’s Abilities to Detect and Study Disease

Pengfei Song will join the faculty of Duke University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering as an associate professor beginning January 1, 2025. With research centered on ultrasound imaging, Song will work with Duke BME’s longstanding biomedical imaging community to create and improve ultrasound technologies that can help detect, diagnose and study a variety of diseases.

When most people think of ultrasound images, they likely think about the grainy black and white prints that pregnant couples receive during health exams that usually require an explanation that a blurry gray blob is actually an arm. But the imaging techniques that Pengfei Song studies in his lab are capable of revealing much more than these traditional tools.

“Ultrasound has moved far beyond just being a tool to image babies,” said Song. “We can image things as small as capillary-sized microvessels, measure tissue stiffness to identify cancerous or benign masses, and even track neural activity in the brain. And we’re always looking for ways to make it better.”

As a predoctoral student at the Mayo Clinic, Song saw first-hand how new ultrasound technologies could improve patient care. This informed his work as a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he worked with the engineering communities to develop new ways to enhance existing ultrasound tools. His new role at Duke gives him the best of both worlds, thanks to the close, collaborative relationship between the engineering and medical schools.

“There are very few universities where an engineering lab is minutes away from a hospital entrance. We could practically roll our ultrasound scanners from our lab to the bedside of patients to collect data and test our new imaging technologies,” said Song. “And doctors at Duke are really enthusiastic and supportive of the research, which is key to facilitating the kinds of clinical studies necessary to improve these tools.”

Song and his lab plan to pursue several different avenues of ultrasound research, each with direct clinical applications. One involves improving imaging techniques to facilitate earlier detection and diagnoses of different types of cancer. At the same time, they’ll explore how ultrasound can be used to evaluate how tissues respond to different cancer therapeutics.

Another focus involves using ultrasound to study brain activity.

“An MRI or CT scan are the primary tools used to image the brain, but our techniques are so precise that we can measure small vessels in the brain by tracking contrast microbubbles in the blood flow,” said Song. “We hope to use this ability to gain more information about how the brain changes throughout neurological problems like stroke or diseases like cancer, dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.”

Song will also develop new ultrasound techniques to improve the diagnosis of small vessel disease in the heart, which occurs when the walls of the small arteries in the heart aren’t working properly, causing chest pain, shortness of breath and, in severe cases, heart attacks.

“When patients can come to the clinic with chest pain, most of the tests only reveal if there is a problem with the large vessels in the heart,” he said. “The existing imaging modalities can’t see those small vessels, so we think that’s where we can come in to fill that clinical gap. Women especially have a higher prevalence for small vessel disease in the heart, so there is a real need for these types of tools.”

Even as he plans new projects and collaborations, Song is also cognizant of the legacy of the ultrasound community he’ll be joining at Duke. Not only was 3D ultrasound invented in Duke BME by Stephen Smith and Olaf Von Ramm, but techniques developed by Gregg Trahey and Kathy Nightingale have been implemented into most commercial ultrasound scanners. As Trahey once said, “Duke is the place to be if you want to go into ultrasound.”

“There are many generations of superstars in our field who are from Duke BME,” said Song. “I’m so excited to be a member of this community and utilize its expertise to make a real clinical impact.”