Simply put, a portable Ultrasound Machine is a smaller, lightweight version of their predecessors. In most cases, they can be carried by hand, and in some cases, run on battery power alone. The first portable ultrasound machines arrived in the early 1980s but battery powered systems that could be easily carried did not arrive until the late 1990s.
A lap-top sized device could save the lives of soldiers and civilians that can detect bleeding in the brain could help save the lives of soldiers on the battlefield and people living in remote communities far from well-equipped hospitals.
Researchers in Scotland have created software for existing ultrasound scanners that allows the devices to be used by medics with no formal training in diagnosing brain injuries.
Equipped with the software, the laptop-sized machines can tell users when they have scanned all of a patient’s brain. It then allows them to share a 3D reconstruction with a specialist doctor over the internet. “The problem with ultrasound is it’s not the easiest imaging to look at. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, it can be hard to take the right images for a diagnosis,” said Leila Eadie, who is leading the project at the University of Aberdeen.
While this research is speaking specifically to brain injuries, imagine if you were Dr. Jerri Lin Nielsen working at the South Pole in 1999. Imagine that you find a lump that could be cancer. What do you do? You can’t call your doctor and come in for an appointment.
Now imagine that all you had to do was to hold a smartphone over her skin to take a 3D ultrasound image that the phone would send to her doctor for diagnosis. It could provide an image so clear and so exact that it could save the time and pain of biopsy and ensure that crucial treatment was given right away. Dr. Nielsen had to manage without that in 1999. But a team of researchers at the Masdar Institute and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are working to make it a reality in the near future.
While some portable ultrasound technologies exist, they come with their own trade-offs, in cost, efficacy and even safety. The research at Masdar Institute of Science and Technology is focused on designing a portable ultrasound device that can be run anywhere, easily, quickly and safely, to help save lives. One important challenge is increasing the image resolution. The sharper the image, the more useful it is. Having the equipment manufactured with a precision lens will provide clearer images, giving the doctor’s a more accurate picture of the changes in the tissues and organs. For instance, an ultrasound that can resolve objects a millimeter or less across could help spot cancer in its early stages, when it is easier to treat.
To achieve this, Masdar is currently exploring the use of a material plate on which ultrasound reverberations accumulate and can be “read back” to produce 2D images. Known as a piezoelectric microarray, this technology would allow much quicker and deeper penetrating scans for 3D imaging.
Not only can this technology be used in the field of medicine, It could also be used to map areas and track objects in applications such as remote sensing in the oil and gas industry, or security, and in every day household uses such as the X-Box Kinect.
Universe Kogaku designs and manufactures optical lenses for Portable Ultrasound Machines, security, high tech and electronic applications. We stock 1000’s of standard lens assemblies and can custom design a solution for scanners, CCTV, CCD/CMOS, medical imaging, surveillance systems, machine vision and night vision systems.