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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."
But is $40K a lot as far as medical devices cost? How much is the x-ray machine at the doctor's office, or the ultrasound equipment at the heart specialist?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
That really no where near the price of a MRI machine so I'm pretty sure that it is as capable as the article makes it sound than thats not that much to spend. Several hospitals in my area have spent 100+ million in renovations.
At $40,000 it may not be around every doctor's neck, but geez just the exam table I sit on and the scale they make me stand on totals a staggering amount. I can't imagine something in the tens of thousands being cost prohibative to the medical field.
The real question is how often will this be used? Not every doctor is going to need this as, it seems, this is going to start out as a specialist item. Your local hospital may only have need for one of these things in the long run.
In any case this is a good step forward and I'm glad to hear about it...
Now, where did I put that pack of Camels???
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
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.
Why, when there is an article about something visual, especially a revolutionary new visualization system, do they never show pictures.
I hate that.
If you are reporting on a neat visual thingy,... SHOW ME THE THINGY. Even a picture of the machine would be a plus, even if it looks exactly like an MRI or some other machine. I don't care if the picture may mean nothing to me. Put a little caption trying to explain it. It doesn't matter, show me SOMETHING.
Does anyone have a picture?
This should be criminal.
(the annoyed MBCook)
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
When MRI and other can cost over $1 million, 40k isn't that much.
MRI machines cost about $2 million each.
$40k for medical equiptment isn't bad. Compare it to the cost of a MRI machine, or even a 'low cost' (which is $100k-$200k) x-ray machine. Radiosurgery machines (for cancer) run $3-5 million. Having an accurate diagnosis for $40k is almost cheap by those standards.
But is $40K a lot as far as medical devices cost? How much is the x-ray machine at the doctor's office, or the ultrasound equipment at the heart specialist?
Those machines go from $50,000 (xray) to $3,000,000 (CT, Linac, MRI). QC, operators and electricity are also expensive.
That makes this device sound cheap, but it could be way overpriced if it's nothing more than a microphone hooked to a stethoscope run through some FFTs. In that case, you are paying for a database of frequency signatures. Even if it's doing some kind of sonic imaging, the techniques are well known and you are paying for a specific implementation that will soon be duplicated. Other things you might be paying for are insurance and other parasitic paperwork. Hats off to the Doctor, but I'd like more details on how the thing works.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This is nice in theory, however I don't see it really catching on.
For one thing, a stethescope is very cheap. Forty-thousand isn't a lot for a hospital, but if it's not necessary, they won't buy it. That money is better spent on salaries, or saving up for that high-tech imagine unit. Furthermore, even with an output from this, it's highly likely they'll order a CT or MRI anyway for a higher resolution picture.
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
IIAMS (Medical Student), and here how I see this device being used, docs will continue using regular stethoscopes because most diagnoses quite straightforward. When there are unusual sounds that require additional insight, then you break out the one VRI that is available in the physician's group. It would be similar to how most cardiac auscultation is straightforward, but when there is something particularly unusual, you send a person for an echo cardiogram. Even there where there is a well established, safe, accurate, non-invasive, relatively cheap imaging modality, you still listen first. Also, imaging isn't infallible, and just like different physicians can disagree about lung sounds, different radiologists can disagree about image interpretation.
TFA says that the price of the imaging modality will drop in the next few years with economies of scale and so forth. This is good, very good. It means that it'll make its way into the GP's practice soon and not just be in the hands of respiratory physicians and hospitals. But, honestly, look at things like this: TFA mentions that as far as replacing the stethoscope goes, it removes any sort of interpersonal bias between doctors in diagnosis. While this is just wonderful in respect to some esoteric diagnoses ie. whether you can *hear* a tiny small-cell carcinoma, but for the rest of us, I feel that a stethoscope, a quiet room and a competent doctor will suffice. The sounds of pneumonia, emphysema, pulmonary oedema, tuberculosis, bronchiole asthma etc. are all quite distinctive and as a medical student, I find it somewhat surprising that there can be any significant argument or doubt regarding the diagnosis of such patients. Heck, even if there was doubt, there are other elements of the presenting complaint (risk factors, family history, blood tests and plain old signs & symptoms) that can help doctors reach a definitive diagnosis. What I'm trying to say is, the old stuff works, its tried and true, and it's not easy to honestly miss pulmonary lesions. So, apart from being a novel visual toy (I know it's an instrument but how much fun is this?!) would it HONESTLY replace a $70 stethoscope and a head full of juicy knowledge brains? Me thinks nah :-p
Note that imaging with sound generated in the lungs naturally is apparently not possible because the source and frequency of the sound cannot be known in advance. The use of the word "Imaging" is apparently fraud.
The BusinessWeek article says, amazingly, begging the question, "Its sales prospects are not just hot air"
Notice that, at present, there is no period at the end of that sentence, suggesting that the article received little or no attention from an editor.
Slashdot has run several stories about companies that had products that they were supposedly trying to bring to market, but which, on close examination, apparently were just methods of collecting investor money, with no real hope of return.
Roland Piquepaille, the author of the Slashdot story, is apparently paid to get articles in publications an on blogs. There has never been any information, that I know of, about whether he pays someone at Slashdot or Slashdot's parent company. His Slashdot stories apparently never note Mr. Piquepaille's affiliations with the companies being discussed.
Slashdot has often been scientifically challenged. The Slashdot article The Car That Makes Its Own Fuel has a +5 moderated First Post that expresses the consensus of the comments on that story.
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?