Welcome

The Global Health and Medical Devices Lab, led by the Castaneda Lab at the University of Rochester, is focused on developing point-of-care medical devices for limited-resource settings. These environments often lack the necessary equipment, infrastructure, and trained personnel. However, this challenge offers a unique opportunity for reverse innovation-designing devices to function under constraints and later adapting them for use in high-resource settings.

Research Interests

Development of Point-of-Care Technologies for resource-limited environments. Ultrasound-based imaging diagnostics for various medical conditions.

We utilize:

• Biomedical Ultrasound
• Photogrammetry
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Benjamín Castañeda, Ph.D.

Volume Sweep Imaging (VSI)

Volume Sweep Imaging (VSI) is a standardized ultrasound acquisition technique designed to overcome the dependency on expert sonographers. Instead of requiring specialized training, VSI enables novice operators to obtain clinically useful data by performing predefined, freehand probe sweeps across specific anatomical regions. Each sweep produces short cine loops that capture temporally rich information, which can later be interpreted by specialists or automated AI systems.

At our lab, we work with validated VSI protocols that target key diagnostic areas, including:

• Obstetrics (OB): fetal biometry, presentation, and placental location.
• Breast: lesion detection and characterization.
• Lung: pneumonia, COVID-19, and respiratory illness screening.
• Thyroid: nodule identification and assessment.
• Right Upper Quadrant (RUQ): liver and gallbladder evaluation.

By leveraging VSI, we aim to expand safe and reliable access to ultrasound in low-resource and underserved settings, while also developing advanced interpretation frameworks—such as AI-based segmentation, classification, and automated reporting—to support consistent and scalable diagnostic imaging.