This is the reason I started looking at ultrasounds, I figured that I could buy one for the $160 cost to get a scan from a doctor. I have looked around for a cheap ultrasound, but $1100 is far cheaper than I was able to find (I got to about $3k but looked like a dodgy dealer so didn't link to it). But 1k is still way more expensive than I think it should be.

It should be a sensor you just plug into and iphone for a few hundred. I mean there is the http://www.thermal.com/thermal-cameras/ thermal camera for only $250, why not ultrasound? Making a photo sensor must be thousands of times more complicated than ultrasounds sensors.

I just want to know why I can't buy one cheaper than my massively more complex iphone :)

I also think you're seriously underestimating the computational cost of converting the measured signal to a usable image. No way is an RPi fast enough to produce a live image with decent quality. There are quite a few papers in the literature about using high-end GPUs to speed up ultrasound imaging and denoising, for commercial vendors I'm guessing it's custom ASIC territory.

Really? Medical ultrasound has a long history predating high-end GPUs. Maybe that kind of computing power is required for modern high-resolution/low-lag devices, but my guess is you could get something usable with a computer as powerful as a RPi.

http://www.ob-ultrasound.net/history1.html

3D scans are another matter, but this is a thread about low cost scanners, so that's out of the picture.

Cheaper thermal imaging sensors like that usually use a very, very low resolution sensor for picking up thermal data, then use interpolation to map the low-resolution data onto a high-resolution image provided by a higher-res conventional camera sensor. Obviously, this approach won't work with ultrasound tech, as there wouldn't be a secondary high-resolution data source.

The key is that the 1600 sells deliver more than one input over time, from a nonstatic signal, which is like shooting photos from different perspectives. I believe cell correlation or whatchamacallit is done in all kinds of variation for CCD data, too.

What makes you think that?

Photo sensors have no moving parts, photons are the carriers of the electromagnetic force, so they readily interface with electronics given the right interface material; any semiconductor material with a matching bandgap will do, photons interacting with a bandgap produces free charge carriers; this is exactly what you're after. The rest is chipscale manufacturing, i.e. lots of sensor cells in a repetetive pattern. You can easily mass produce that in large quantities using photolithography methods, yet even if your process were to bad, that you'd get a low yield it would still be profitable.

Ultrasound on the other hand is acoustics, i.e. mechanical waves. So you're dealing with moving parts, mechanics. Transducers are discrete parts, they can't (yet) be manufactured at chip scale. They're ceramics, and there are lot of parameters that go into manufacturing ceramics which limit the amount that can be produced in a single batch. And then you've to deal with electronics that's not over waaay beyond your typical hobbist level; it's in fact so complex that it goes over the head of most professional electrical engineers and there are companies who are specialised in ultrasonics transducer electronics consulting, doing the difficult design work for the large brand names.

Second, your estimate on the price of PZT elements is not necessarily realistic as the transducer is rather large(22 mm in diameter). A 10X10 array would be impractically large. One can buy PCB mount piezo elements for motors for cents per element in bulk[1]. It might even be possible to modify one of those expensive components into an array as was done in this homemade STM[2]. Although in both cases there are bound to be issues with impedance matching and potentially changes in resonant frequency.

[0] http://www.westmarine.com/sonar [1] http://pcbmotor.com/applications-and-solutions/smd-piezo-com... [2] http://dberard.com/home-built-stm/

Size of market for iPhones compared to size of market for iPhone ultrasound devices. Also, you'll need FDA approval in the US for their use.

For example, the FDA and other agencies are concerned with the effects of transmitting energy into the human body. Medical devices like ultrasound systems are not toys.

I don't mean to be harsh at all, but with respect, I question your assertions here.

And this post is a question because I don't know the answer, so I am just guessing (a lot). I hope someone with actual experience in getting FDA approval for a medical ultrasound machine actually reads it and answers, with how much it cost and what hoops they had to jump through.

In general, there are thousands of regulations that must be satisfied. Some specifications that must be met include ISO 13485, ISO 14971, IEC 60601 3rd Edition, IEC 62304, and probably ten more that I have forgotten about, such as RoHS, WEE, radiated emissions, etc.

The systems I worked with involved multilayer (16 layers plus) circuit boards, custom ASICs, FPGAs, ARM SOCs, etc., mixed OS (e.g., Windows CE and WindRiver, etc.)

The code base is large and complex, as you have not just ultrasound, but often, calculation packages of various kinds (cardiac, OB, etc.) These packages are expensive to develop and have to be carefully verified. If you're measuring the length of a fetal femur and translating the measured length to an estimated gestational age, you don't wish to be wrong. Same deal with cardiac output measurements, etc.

Then there is the whole issue of transducers. It's a complex field, and you have to deal not only with materials (some of which contain RoHS regulated elements, such as lead), but also, dicing saws (to cut the piezo), matching layers, transmission lines (to send signals to / from the transducer and the ultrasound machine front end.)

I'm not trying to be rude, or baffle you with a lot of jargon, it's just that my experience is that building a useful ultrasound machine is much more complex than it might appear from the outside of the industry, so to speak.

Finally, I think building an iPhone is probably even more complex, but the incredible volume of sales tends to make amortizing the cost more palatable.

I could be wrong, of course, and your comments are welcome.

Electronics wise, we are using a single element, mechanically translated (similar to the atl access pv10 probe) - then with a single element you can cut on the price (so far our prototype parts costs 250$/300$) while still giving a basic image for the user, who doesn't all the time need all the feature of a high-end ultrasound scanner =)

What do you think?

Do you think that a lot of that complexity would be reduced by opening it up to a wider development community through open source? How much open source, consumer electronics, were used? Did you source the transducers from another company, or make them in house?

Cheers again for the comment.

The post is necessarily incomplete; I don't think I can give you a full appreciation for all that is involved. And I don't wish to give the impression that ultrasound is necessarily more complex than other imaging modalities, such as MRI, PET, etc.

I wouldn't rule out open source, and many open source tools are used in the engineering process (e.g., gcc, git, etc.) I don't know about including open source components in a commercial code base, though. The lawyers usually ran away screaming whenever we would suggest using any open-source code.

Certainly the high-volume electronics industry makes components that are used in ultrasound systems. Some of the ARM SOCs, for example, and I suppose, some of the FPGAs, DSPs, etc. There are also a number of custom components, such as ASICs and combined analog-digital parts that show up in the so-called "front end."

The companies I have worked for designed their own transducers. That really is a science as well. Making a transducer probably involves at least 100 - 150 process steps, and some very expensive equipment (dicing saws, for example.) You also often have injection-molded parts (e.g., the transducer handle itself) that are expensive to produce (the molds for the injection molding machine are done with 3D solid modeling tools, then CNC machined from steel, etc.

You also have whole departments of people that work in "Regulatory Affairs" and/or "Compliance Engineering."

You also need to employ people to "optimize" your ultrasound images, in each of the different modes you might support: B-mode (2D), doppler, M-mode, color power doppler, etc. You also have things like harmonic imaging, etc.

Then there is sending images you have collected off to the various PACS systems that hospitals have. This usually involves a complex protocol known as DICOM.

Ok, I'm out of gas for this comment. Again, not trying to drown you in jargon, just suggesting that there is a reason that new ultrasound machines tend to be pricey; that reason is that NRE (non-recurring engineering) is very expensive, actually building the boards is expensive, shipping the systems and maintaining them in the field is expensive, and maintaining all of the other systems you have to have in place to be a viable ultrasound company is really expensive.

Hope this helps; thanks for letting me share a bit of my experience.

Once you see the uphill road, you realize you're better off starting from scratch and writing the product yourself instead of depending on OSS. For some noncritical aspects, it's fine, but then you get into the definition of "noncritical" :-)

It also depends on the class of your device (A, B or C in 62304 parlance) how much rigor you must put into your software process.

Ultimately it didn't matter much for our beauty product but it would be a big problem if we tried to use them for imaging.

At one point in time, I had a number of people in incoming receiving working for me. We had to do all kinds of quality control on incoming components, such as castings, PCBs, etc. We had automated measuring machines, etc. It's all very expensive to set this stuff up and staff it.

We also had to use an XRF gun on parts, to make sure we weren't being shipped non-RoHS parts.

As I remember, one of the add-ins for our Agile PLM system (Agile is an Oracle product) was on the order of a few hundred thousand dollars for licensing fees and setup, not counting the months of consulting time necessary to load bills of materials, etc., into the system.

Just to point out injection molding, 3D solid modelling, and CNC machining don't have to be super expensive these days.

Large volumes, and especially high end stuff... sure that takes a lot of up-front cost. But for smaller volumes (eg prototyping, short run) the costs are very reasonable now.

It seems due to continuing development of Open Source hardware and software in these fields, which created good virtous cycles for them. Hopefully this continues... :)

Note - saying the above as someone who's into 3D solid modelling and CNC machining already. Haven't gotten into injection molding yet, but it's on my personal ToDo list for not far off. :D

The fact that this company has to work with very low level components and that it had no spin-off on other areas is a market flaw, not something inherent on their devices.

Don't know if that'd the kind of thing or too basic?

And the interesting detail, in the article that the author links there is this opinion from the doctor who uses the portable ultrasound device:

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2014/05/pocket-ultrasound-machin...

"Other doctors often ask me if I bill for my exams. I don’t, because billing and the detailed documentation and posturing that would be necessary to prove to an insurance company that an ultrasound was necessary would take more time than I have."

The rest of the article is also insightful.