tachydyne

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.

20 years of CMUT being the next big thing in ultrasound has left me a sceptic, but I know some really smart people at Butterfly. I don't think they would bring a device to market that they didn't think was competitive. My guess is that it'll be okay, not the best imaging handheld device on the market but better than several of our competitors.

I work for a competitor to Butterfly, and the main difference between this device and other ultrasound transducers is the use of a CMUT array instead of the typical piezoelectric crystal. CMUT arrays are MEMS devices, made in a semiconductor fab using the same processes as other ICs. This makes them cheaper to produce than traditional arrays where the elements have to individually sliced and wired to the electronics. CMUT isn't new, it's been being worked on for 20 years, but it isn't used because it is much less sensitive than the piezoelectric arrays. Either Butterfly has made a breakthrough and are choosing growth over profit margins, or they are trying to make up for worse performance with a much cheaper price. We won't know which until their device is actually on sale.

Android offers VectorDrawable for this purpose, and Android Studio will automatically convert SVGs for you. It works great for icons and other "material" stuff, anything where flat colors and simple paths are sufficient. I believe there is also a support library to use it on older OS versions but have no experience with that since we're happy with 5.0+ for our app. I highly recommend it over making all those PNGs for different screen densities.

This comment reminds me, there are actually a bunch of Android tablets that shipped with Intel Atom x86 processors. Intel worked some magic with libhoudini that allowed them to run ARM binaries surprisingly fast. If you're an app maker who actually cares about those devices (like my employer) then you end up building all your native code for x86 too. I recall the ARM binaries running at more than 50% of the native x86 ones, running optimized threaded and vectorized image processing code. I wish Intel would talk more about that library. I'd love to know what techniques it used.

> * a preference for facts and logic over feelings when justifying beliefs

As someone who falls in the middle on many issues, I've been saddened to see so many republicans deny the existence of global warming. On many issues that are hot topics in this country reasonable people can disagree, but on global warming the facts are very clear. If populist conservatism believes so strongly in the facts, why is there such a strong push to deny them in this very important case?