A regular ultrasound machine costs over $100,000 but a new ultrasound on a chip device attached to smartphone will be $2000 in 2018. It will be portable and will eventually make ultrasound as common as blood pressure cuffs in hospitals, clinics and doctors offices and with first responders and field medics.
Butterfly iQ is FDA 510(k) cleared for diagnostic imaging across 13 clinical applications which span the whole body:
Abdominal
Cardiac Adult
Cardiac Pediatric
Fetal/Obstetric
Gynecological
Musculo-Skeletal (Conventional)
Musculo-Skeletal (Superficial)
Pediatric
Peripheral Vessel
Procedural Guidance
Small Organ
Urology
Butterfly iQ can be purchased by any licensed healthcare practitioner or facility in the United States permitted to perform diagnostic ultrasound in their state of practice. Butterfly iQ is a prescription device and is not yet available for use by consumers.
Butterfly iQ will begin shipping to customers in early 2018.
Supported Devices:
iPhone SE
iPhone 6S
iPhone 6S Plus
iPhone 7
iPhone 7 Plus
iPhone 8
iPhone 8 Plus
iPhone X
The Butterfly Network ultrasound chip is based on the software that combines thousands of telescopes to generate better astronomy images.
Arrays of capacitive micromachined ultrasound transducers (CMUT) were printed onto a semiconductor chip.
Stanford professor Pierre Khuri-Yakub, who made the first CMUT back in 1994 helped with the chip.
There are amplifiers and signal processors on the chip.
Deep learning software combines the signals and helps interpret the images.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
The problem is Company A builds a diagnostic machine and Company B will copy it but will add on a whole bunch of bells and whistles which make it more expensive. Guess which machine sells in the US? By the way, those bells and whistles don’t even get used all that often…
So how is this machine going to survive in that market??? It won’t! We could buy cheaper machines now because they exist overseas but they don’t sell here. I suspect the government needs to create regulations controlling the maximum charges for procedures using such machines to force the use of cheaper machines. Either that or limit the features on the machine.