From the March 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Tsung is working with Doctors Without Borders on a pilot program in South Sudan to expand the use of ultrasound in temporary field hospitals providing emergency care. They are using ultrasound to diagnose both pneumonia and malaria.
“There is a lot of malaria there in Africa, so when children come in with a fever they don’t know if it’s malaria or pneumonia,” he says. “With the ultrasound, they can have a handle on what they are dealing with.”
Ad Statistics
Times Displayed: 109945
Times Visited: 6642 MIT labs, experts in Multi-Vendor component level repair of: MRI Coils, RF amplifiers, Gradient Amplifiers Contrast Media Injectors. System repairs, sub-assembly repairs, component level repairs, refurbish/calibrate. info@mitlabsusa.com/+1 (305) 470-8013
GE Healthcare’s Vscan Access is a handheld ultrasound system designed specifically for evaluating expecting mothers and geared toward midwives, general practitioners, paramedics and clinical officers in developing regions in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Other, even more compact, solutions like Philips Lumify and the Clarius ultrasound systems are compatible with iPhone and Android devices. The transducer plugs into the device and can begin scanning patients.
A newcomer to the smartphone-based ultrasound market, the Butterfly iQ ultrasound-on-a-chip imaging system, boasts a $2,000 sticker price and has recently caught the attention of Tsung.
Butterfly iQ is supported on iOS and received FDA clearance in October. It combines an impressive 10,000 sensors – roughly 40 times more than conventional systems with six-figure price tags.
Like Lumify, the Butterfly iQ can be used to diagnose pediatric pneumonia. As these technologies are adopted in regions where medical imaging is most needed, pneumonia will hopefully become less of a global threat.
Part of that challenge is making sure that the people using the devices are capable of performing the exams.
Butterfly Network, the Connecticut-based developer of the ultrasound, also created artificial intelligence (AI) applications for image acquisition and interpretation purposes. Like Vscan and other handheld ultrasound systems, the goal is to simplify the acquisition process.
Butterfly iQ connects to a HIPAA-compliant cloud to store images, enable collaboration among clinicians and transmit images to the hospital’s electronic medical record. Butterfly Cloud also provides insight into the hospital’s ultrasound utilization and return-on-investment trends.
Taking the uncertainty out of chest X-ray with AI
Despite all the promise that ultrasound is showing in the area of pediatric pneumonia, chest X-ray is still by far the most common diagnostic tool being used. But human error can compromise an accurate diagnosis.
To improve chest X-ray interpretation, Stanford University researchers have developed an AI algorithm called CheXNet that they claim can diagnose pneumonia better than expert radiologists working alone.
