מיכאל ברמן

A native Israeli, Michael Berman received his B.Sc., M.Sc.and Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Tel Aviv University, Israel. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. L.S Cederbaum at the Theoretische Chemie, University of Heidelberg, Germany, after which he spent 6 years at the Fritz Haber Center, Chemistry Institute, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Michael spent over 20 years in industry. During this period he established and secured funding for 4 new technology entities from scratch, one centre in Switzerland, one centre in Israel, both at Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), and two startup companies in Israel. These entities have produced innovative technologies and products.

Michael joined the faculty of Hadassah College in 2011. He is the Head of the Computers in Medicine Track at the Computer Science Department and the Head of the Authority for Research and Development of the College.

Ultrasound of the Breast

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of death from cancer. Early detection is widely believed to reduce breast cancer mortality by allowing intervention at an earlier stage of cancer progression. Screening [X-ray] mammography has secured a place as the gold standard routine health maintenance procedure for women – this is a mature technology that provides high-quality images in the majority of patients. However, conventional mammography does not detect all breast cancers, including some that are palpable, and as many as three-quarters of all breast lesions biopsied because of a suspicious finding on a mammogram turn out to be benign. The purpose of this research is to find alternative solutions to early detection of breast cancer.

Ultrasound Beamforming and Ultrasound Tomography

The conventional ultrasound approach is driven by the need for real-time data acquisition and display. Therefore, some of the complex physics associated with propagation of sound waves is traded off. One of the tradeoffs corresponds to the usage of straight-ray theory, a basic approximation of the true physics of acoustic wave propagation, which is only valid for purely homogenous media. A second important tradeoff is the assumption of a 2 dimensional geometry in which only the directly backscattered reflections are collected. The purpose of this research is to implement beamforming and tomography approaches that “undo” the trade-offs of conventional ultrasound, leading to a marked increase in the signal-to-noise ratio, while reducing artifacts and yielding higher quality images for greater clinical “sensitivity”. Furthermore, the signals that propagate through the anatomy, and which are never reflected back, contain additional information.

Technology and Academic Contributions

Michael has developed technology, issued patents, and published scientific papers and technology reports in the following subjects: