Re:Butterfly iQ – A cheap handheld ultrasound tool with AI s...
by pjwMD on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @11:32AM
(#15602197)
As an internal medicine phsysician who has been using a handheld daily for the past few years I would only add that high image quality is not always needed for many of our most important applications: Lung, IVC, bladder, DVT, abscess. US is dramatically more accurate than physical exam and stethoscope In these cases.
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Re:Butterfly iQ – A cheap handheld ultrasound tool with AI s...
by tachydyne on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @08:25PM
(#15606803)
Agreed. I was talking specifically about CMUT vs Piezoelectric. If high image quality was always a requirement, the handheld market probably wouldn't exist at all.
Butterfly is right to focus on getting an answer over image quality. As a startup they will likely be able to iterate quickly on machine learning, which is critically important to growing the ultrasound market. Right now the biggest barrier to adoption is the difficulty of reading ultrasound images, and machine learning is the most promising solution to that. I think that is more likely to be their competitive differentiator than their use of CMUT.