Low-cost upgrade could more easily image babies, trauma patients who can’t be moved
[Video: https://youtu.be/0-92hatFap0]
Technology that keeps track of how your smartphone is oriented can now give $50,000 ultrasound machines many of the 3-D imaging abilities of their $250,000 counterparts -- for the cost of a $10 microchip.
Doctors and engineers from Duke and Stanford universities will demonstrate their device Oct. 31 at the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) Research Forum in Washington, D.C.
The key to the technology is a fingernail-sized microchip that mounts onto a traditional ultrasound probe -- the plastic scanner that slides over gel-slathered skin to relay two-dimensional images of what lies beneath.
Just like a Nintendo Wii video game controller, the chip registers the probe’s orientation, then uses software to seamlessly stitch hundreds of individual slices of the anatomy together in three dimensions.
The result is an instant 3-D model similar in quality to a CT scan or MRI, said Joshua Broder, M.D., an emergency physician and associate professor of surgery at Duke Health and one of the creators of the technology. Two-D ultrasound machines with higher resolution have clearer 3-D pictures.
“With 2-D technology you see a visual slice of an organ, but without any context, you can make mistakes,” Broder said. “These are problems that can be solved with the added orientation and holistic context of 3-D technology. Gaining that ability at an incredibly low cost by taking existing machines and upgrading them seemed like the best solution to us.”
Broder pondered the possibilities of 3-D ultrasound in 2014 while playing with a Nintendo Wii gaming system with his son, he said. With the game console’s ability to accurately track the exact position of the controller, he wondered, why not just duct-tape the controller to an ultrasound probe?