My daughter recently had an ultrasound to check the size of her thyroid gland, and I was impressed by the technician’s ability to immediately find the area of interest as well as by the resolution of the tool.

If only finding oil and gas was that easy.

Still, there is a lot of technology transfer potential between medical imaging and oil and gas exploration, and this fact was not lost on organizers at the University of Houston, who recently put on a day-long conference bringing together experts from local hospitals and from oil and gas and service companies. The conference covered the gamut from the use of tracers to blood flow visualization to seismic imaging to history-matching.

Dr. Juri Gelovani, professor and chairman of experimental diagnostic imaging at MD Anderson, discussed the use of tracers to find tumors in the body. Biological tracers are viruses from which toxins have been removed. “We use the capacity of the virus to spread throughout the body,” he said. They can be injected in different cells to determine fluid flow and concentration. He added that inactive and active enzymes are used to find tumors. A use in oil and gas could be nano particle-based agents that react with certain chemicals in the subsurface, he said.

One of the talks that generated the most discussion was given by Dr. Ralph Metcalfe, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Houston. Metcalfe has done studies on blood flow characteristics and said that his findings indicate that blood flow is complicated and often counter-intuitive. Tests on animals and lab simulations have helped to better understand blood flow characteristics. This generated a discussion on modeling that focused on the importance of assumptions and data quality.

Dr. Luc Bidaut, an associate professor of imaging physics at MD Anderson, discussed the different types of imaging techniques available and their applications. One “hybrid” machine combines magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography. Another application is called elastography and actually records shear wave frequencies by thumping patients and measuring the reaction.

The first real oil and gas presentation was given by Dr. Sverre Brandsberg-Dahl, manager of depth imaging at PGS. He quantified some of the similarities and differences between seismic imaging and medical imaging, and his main conclusion seemed to be that medical imagers have many more tools at their disposal than explorationists.

He mentioned, for instance, that while electromagnetic measurements are now being used for exploration, mostly the industry relies on a single modality, seismic. “The medical community has the technology for transmission and reflectors,” he said. “Your target can be rolled into the lab, you have a good data coverage medium, and you have known velocities.”

Seismic is constrained to one surface, and the medium in which the waves propagate is unknown.

“We have a chicken-and-egg model,” Brandsberg-Dahl said. “We can’t make the image without a good understanding of the velocities.”

He added that the vast array of machines available to the medical community means they only use certain imaging techniques on certain problems, where seismic is kind of a one-size-fits-all proposition. “We’re not good at adapting equipment to what we’re doing,” he said. “Today we hit everything with one hammer.”

One of his slides showed the size of a typical seismic survey overlain on a map of Manhattan. “We’d be happy if we could image the buildings,” he said.

Seismic acquisition surveys also are designed for the dominant frequency, while medical imagers can tune the signals for their purposes.

Robert Stewart, a professor in the department of geosciences at the University of Houston, discussed the need for innovation in the industry. He explained that creativity was driven by a demand pull and a technology push, and combined with available technology, this drives innovation. He mentioned several technologies that have united the oil and gas industry with others, including tomography (medicine); gravity (astronomy); and “geo-archaeology,” in which seismic tools have been used to image inside tombs in South America.

Technology he felt had potential included the use of nano-tracers with accelerometers for fracturing and nano-shells in drilling fluids.

Geophysicists would likely feel like kids in candy shops if they had access to the variety of imaging techniques available to medical imagers. This kind of cross-fertilization may move that dream closer to reality.