How Ultrasound Became Ultra Small

Re:How Ultrasound Became Ultra Small by Foomf on Tuesday March 19, 2024 @02:15AM (#39753375)

Laptop-sized ultrasound machines have been a thing for at least a decade at this point. It feels insincere to frame ultrasound machines as these big things lugged around on carts still. Hospitals still like those, but there's plenty of pre-hospital ultrasound machines that are compact. Not smartphone compact, but it feels weird for the article to completely omit them.

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Re:How Ultrasound Became Ultra Small by hgomersall on Tuesday March 19, 2024 @03:15AM (#39753578)

The article is a bit of a puff piece for Butterfly and Exo. MEMS address a problem, but not necessarily the hard one for portable ultrasound. There are plenty of handheld plain old PZT transducer based devices out there.

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Re:How Ultrasound Became Ultra Small by Cthulhu_ on Tuesday March 19, 2024 @04:58AM (#39753948)

The other thing to consider is that these machines cost money and have a write-off lifetime, I wouldn't be surprised if they're designed and purchased for a lifetime of 10, 15 years, with only some consumables like new probes and cables every once in a while.

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Re:How Ultrasound Became Ultra Small by xattt on Tuesday March 19, 2024 @05:43AM (#39754149)

GE had a handheld model that they featured in some feel-good “we are GE” ad in the late 2000s/2010s.

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Re:How Ultrasound Became Ultra Small by nyrikki on Tuesday March 19, 2024 @11:53AM (#39757073)

I was at Sonosite in the mid 2000s, that was that entire company. Custom analog ASIC based, but portable tablets.

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Re:How Ultrasound Became Ultra Small by Foomf on Tuesday March 19, 2024 @06:23PM (#39760927)

Me too! That's the only reason I know laptop-sized portable ultrasound machines exist. I had an internship there one summer where I wrote automation software for the M-Turbo.

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