Revitalizing Medical Imaging With Ultrasound-On-a-Chip

catchblue22 writes: MIT Technology Review has an article about a device being developed by Butterfly Network that aims to make medical imaging dirt cheap. From the article: "Butterfly's patent applications describe its aim as building compact, versatile new ultrasound scanners that can create 3-D images in real time. Hold it up to a person's chest, and you would look through 'what appears to be a window' into the body, according to the documents. ... Most ultrasound machines use small piezoelectric crystals or ceramics to generate and receive sound waves. But these have to be carefully wired together, then attached via cables to a separate box to process the signals. Anyone who can integrate ultrasound elements directly onto a computer chip could manufacture them cheaply in large batches, and more easily create the type of arrays needed to produce 3-D images."

Comments

Butterfly?

[ArcadeMan]

I remember another "Butterfly Something" company that also had a "Something-On-a-Chip" product, are they related?

Info on medical imaging, for those interested

[mha]

https://www.edx.org/course/uqx...

The course's contents is still accessible. "Episode 3" is about Ultrasound.

All videos from the course on Youtube (there is a lot more content on edX - text and images):

https://www.youtube.com/channe...

Look for "Brian has an Ultrasound" in that list (after loading all videos under that account) and go backwards (left and up) in the list for all videos on ultrasound.

The course/the videos are really interesting!

Yawn!

[Anonymous Coward]

I did this with my arduino a few years ago. Got the parts at Microcenter.

Re:Anyone has a link to a patent app?

[binarylarry]

dirt cheap to manufacture, no one said anything about dirt cheap to buy.

Medical equipment is a huge scam, makes $500 dollar hammers look like a walmart special.