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Imaging Breakthrough "Sees" Lung Disease
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to BusinessWeek, an Israeli startup, aptly named Deep Breeze, has developed a high-tech replacement for the 200-year-old stethoscope. This noninvasive device can draw, in seconds, an image of your lungs by listening to its vibrations. The Vibration Response Imaging (VRI) system could already be used in Israel, Europe and South Korea. Last month, the US Food and Drug Administration approved its introduction in the US. But don't expect to see one of these systems used by your local physician anytime soon. This VRI system will carry a price tag of over $40K."
I can tell you that radiology/cardiology and a lot of the imaging modalities is really where hospitals make a lot of their bucks. I'm actually a medical consultant. While I don't work with the machines much at all, I work with getting properly trained staff out at the places. I get the impression that a lot of the machines are in the quarter to half million dollar range. I can tell you that an ultrasound technologist can make quite a few pretty pennies :) The good ones can get into the 6 figures easily annually. Hospitals rely on them so much that when they're short handed, they're willing to pay $50 to $100 dollars per hour for long extended periods (3-12 months at a time) to make sure they have someone running their machines.
From wikipedia: "The [MRI] scanners used in medicine have a typical magnetic field strength of 0.3 to 3 teslas. Construction costs approximately US$ 1 million per tesla, and maintenance an additional several hundred thousand dollars per year." X ray machines are significantly cheaper, but they'd still make $40k seem cheap.
When MRI and other can cost over $1 million, 40k isn't that much.
MRI machines cost about $2 million each.
Visit the site for some images from the thingy.
http://www.deepbreeze.com/Default.aspx?state=Int
Most of the links are broken but there's more under FAQ.
I have a picture, a vest made of microphones:
a ct/128/4/476S
http://meeting.chestjournal.org/cgi/content/abstr
Here's a link to the abstract on pubmed. Looks like it's a bit early to say how useful it'll be.
d &Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=17551264&ordinalp os=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_Res ultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
Dynamic Visualization of Lung Sounds with a Vibration Response Device: A Case Series.
Dellinger RP, Parrillo JE, Kushnir A, Rossi M, Kushnir I.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubme
Actually, you're talking about pulse-echo ultrasound, as when you see whether your unborn child has a wee-wee or goat horns or whatever. "Ultrasound" as used by people who work with it generally just refers to the frequency ranges above human hearing (as it should).
There is active ultrasound (baby monitors, etc.) and passive ultrasound, which relies on picking up sounds produced by whatever processes you're trying to monitor. I agree that large amounts of the acoustic energy produced by biological processes are going to be at relatively low frequencies. However, any process which produces sharp turn-on/turn-off signals (as, for example, aveoli in the lungs making their crackling noises, blood flowing in arteries, etc.) will have a fair amount of their energy at high frequencies. With narrow band-pass filters, it's remarkable how one can pull out high-frequency signals, even from processes where you wouldn't expect them to occur. As long as the signal is there, why not take advantage of it? After all, whatever information we can pull out of the human body has got to help.
Comany website:
i xp_system_from_deep_breeze.htmlm onary_imaging_modality_approved_by_the_fda.htmlh aft_archiv1/0000001_digitales_stethoskop.html
http://www.deepbreeze.com/
Multimedia:
http://medgadget.com/archives/2007/07/video_of_vr
http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2007/07/new_pul
http://www.thieme.de/viamedici/aktuelles/wissensc
$40k for medical equiptment isn't bad.
$40K is chump change. A decent MRI machine costs at least a couple of million dollars. Just starting up the machine can cost $100,000 (you don't turn them off when you're done). Upgrades generally run hundreds of thousands of dollars. More importantly, like x-rays, MRIs and CT-Scanners, not every doctor needs one. A specialist would have it or a radiology center would have it and the doctor sends you there to get the work done, just like x-rays, MRIs and CT scans.
If they charged say $150 per use you only need to use it on 400 patients before you make your money back. That's nothing... Assuming a patient a day on average, it'd be paid for in about a year. That's just really cheap my medical standards in developed countries.
Ok, more on the technique of VRI (Vibration Response Imaging)
l ogy/article-11.html
Here is the best description I could find that is freely available (not in a protected journal.) http://www.ctsnet.org/sections/thoracic/newtechno
The system basically has an array of sensors that sit over the patient's back, as they breathe in and out. It then displays an image from the sensors with a grey scale corresponding to the intensity of a given bin of frequencies observed by that sensor (and interpolated from nearby sensors, I presume.) You then get an image versus time of the frequencies in the lung, kind of like listening with your stethoscope in a bunch of different areas at once over many periods of time. It doesn't do any 3d imaging or interpolation.
A few studies exist validating the technique -- great that research like this is going on, but I don't think that I'd personally invest my healthcare dollars in this quite yet!
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?