Ultrasound Wearables
The benefits of ultrasound imaging are well-known, especially when you find out you will be the parents of a baby or multiple babies, but typical ultrasound procedures require a trained sonographer whose abilities can help or hinder the imaging of the body’s soft tissue, with relatively short time limits on how long the session can last and where it can be done, which is usually in a doctor’s office or hospital. A group of researchers at MIT have come up with a way to make such ultrasound imaging as simple as applying a stick-on patch, which is able to transmit ultrasound images wirelessly for up to 48 hours.
Those who have blood sugar issues are quite familiar with adhesive monitoring patches made by Dexcom (DXCM) or Medtronic (MDT), which allow continuous monitoring of blood sugar levels for ~14 days, but the MIT engineers have taken the patch idea to another level as these patches, which are placed on the skin over a small dab of gel, can send continuous high resolution ultrasound images to a monitor, allowing monitoring o recording those images while the patient is performing a normal routine. As the capabilities of the patches are improved they can be tailored to placement on various parts of the body, transmitting to a smartphone that is able to analyze the image and notify the patient or doctor when an anomaly occurs.
The patches are a vast improvement over the low resolution devices that have been tried in the past, with a flexible adhesive layer made of a hydrogel/elastomer sandwich and a more rigid transducer array being combined to allow the patch to conform to the skin’s surface while remaining at a precise location with the elastomer keeping the hydrogel hydrated, which is necessary for the sound waves to penetrate internal organs. The entire patch is roughly the size of a postage stamp and is ~3mm thick. During voluntary human tests the researchers were able to see the diameter of blood vessels change when moving from a sitting to a standing position, changes to the shape of the heart during exercise, and revealed patterns in muscles during weight lifting that could indicate temporary micro-damage, essentially telling the user when the workout was beginning to cause damage.
While the project continues to work toward full wireless functionality and better algorithms for image diagnosis, the idea of wearable ultrasound imaging has many uses for monitoring fetal development or the growth or shrinkage of tumors and with a relatively inexpensive device, can be used by patients and clinicians to monitor bodily functions in real time and then disposed of, without the need for hospital based imaging systems, with the ultimate goal of making such devices as accessible to doctors and consumers as continuous blood sugar monitors have become. There is a short (2:08) video below.
https://youtu.be/Kn2J8W4csNc
Those who have blood sugar issues are quite familiar with adhesive monitoring patches made by Dexcom (DXCM) or Medtronic (MDT), which allow continuous monitoring of blood sugar levels for ~14 days, but the MIT engineers have taken the patch idea to another level as these patches, which are placed on the skin over a small dab of gel, can send continuous high resolution ultrasound images to a monitor, allowing monitoring o recording those images while the patient is performing a normal routine. As the capabilities of the patches are improved they can be tailored to placement on various parts of the body, transmitting to a smartphone that is able to analyze the image and notify the patient or doctor when an anomaly occurs.
The patches are a vast improvement over the low resolution devices that have been tried in the past, with a flexible adhesive layer made of a hydrogel/elastomer sandwich and a more rigid transducer array being combined to allow the patch to conform to the skin’s surface while remaining at a precise location with the elastomer keeping the hydrogel hydrated, which is necessary for the sound waves to penetrate internal organs. The entire patch is roughly the size of a postage stamp and is ~3mm thick. During voluntary human tests the researchers were able to see the diameter of blood vessels change when moving from a sitting to a standing position, changes to the shape of the heart during exercise, and revealed patterns in muscles during weight lifting that could indicate temporary micro-damage, essentially telling the user when the workout was beginning to cause damage.
While the project continues to work toward full wireless functionality and better algorithms for image diagnosis, the idea of wearable ultrasound imaging has many uses for monitoring fetal development or the growth or shrinkage of tumors and with a relatively inexpensive device, can be used by patients and clinicians to monitor bodily functions in real time and then disposed of, without the need for hospital based imaging systems, with the ultimate goal of making such devices as accessible to doctors and consumers as continuous blood sugar monitors have become. There is a short (2:08) video below.
https://youtu.be/Kn2J8W4csNc
Ultrasound Image of Triplets - Source: https://www.ottawahospital.on.ca/en/clinical-services/deptpgrmcs/departments/obstetrics-gynecology-and-newborn-care/multiple-pregnancy/types-of-multiples/triplets-and-more/
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