In the decades after the deployment of the first clinical ultrasound machine in 1956, high-frequency scanners have become a common tool in many clinician diagnostic libraries—at least in developed countries. Unfortunately, while there are more and smaller, cheaper devices like General Electric's Vscan, these scanners are still very expensive. The current price of a machine is between $9,000 and $20,000, and a single scan costs about $250.
This is because conventional ultrasonic machines rely on transducers containing quartz crystals and other special components to produce images. But the startup, founded by the 2015 National Technology and Innovation Medal winner and Carnegie Mellon University graduate Jonathan Rothberg, claims to have pioneered a technologically superior alternative. The company's eponymous Butterfly iQ device, valued at $2,000, is able to shrink ultrasound technology to electric shaver-sized peripherals.
Butterfly announced today that it has received $250 million in investments from Fidelity's D-round financing, including Fosun Pharma, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Jamie Dinan and other returning investors. Existing investors participate in the investment.
“This is an important step towards delivering ultrasound commitments to millions of people who cannot access this basic medical technology,†Rothberg said earlier this year. “I’m trying to popularize ultrasound imaging, as I did with DNA sequencing. Two-thirds of the world’s people don’t have access to medical imaging services, and even in developed countries, the lack of cost and expertise limits medical imaging. obtain."
Butterfly iQ uploads "Clinical Quality" ultrasound to Butterfly's cloud storage service via the iPhone, which was approved by the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in October 2017 for abdominal, cardiovascular, fetal, gynaecological, urinary, Musculoskeletal and seven other clinical applications.
An off-the-shelf ultrasonic scanner applies a current to the crystal (or multiple crystals) to generate vibrations, which in turn generate sound waves. (This is called the piezoelectric effect.) These waves pass through the body and reach the boundary between the tissues or organs, some of which are reflected back to the crystal and produce current when in contact. Since the speed of sound in the body tissue remains the same, and because the return time of each echo can be easily measured, the scanner's computing unit is able to measure the distance between the transducer and the boundary. Their calculations become part of the final image.
Butterfly iQ's ultrasound chip, a semiconductor wafer containing discrete signal processors and amplifiers, acts as a traditional transducer, but exchanges the capacitive micromachined ultrasound transducer layer with a crystal—essentially suspended a drum-shaped metal plate between the two electrodes. A single chip has up to 10,000 transducer channels that, when powered, resonate at frequencies suitable for different tissue types. Thanks to a unique "butterfly network" architecture that intelligently delegates inter-channel processing, iQ can perform approximately 5 trillion operations per second during scanning - enough for 3D ultrasound imaging in any area of ​​the body .
Butterfly said that iQ is the world's first chip ultrasound capable of full-body imaging. Conventional transducer crystals must be tuned to produce ultrasonic waves of a particular depth, but silicon does not have such a limitation; adjustment of the CMUT electric field allows it to dynamically switch frequencies. "If we want to go deeper, we can let them work at 1 MHz. If we want to be shallow, we can let them work at 5 MHz," Rothberg said in an interview with IEEE Spectrum.
Of course, hardware is only half of it, but Butterfly's software ecosystem is equally great. iQ's companion smartphone app uses artificial intelligence to streamline the setup process. The computer vision algorithm takes over the lens of the mobile phone camera and detects the position of the probe in real time, guiding the user to accurately position the probe through the augmented reality prompt. (Butterfly calls it "remote guidance.") Another artificial intelligence system performs quality checks and simple analysis on each image, but this is not shipped in the first wave of production equipment - it is awaiting separate approval from the FDA.
The cloud storage service for uploading images is AES 256-bit encrypted and SOC II certified, fully compliant with HIPPA, a 1996 US law designed to protect personal information collected in medical records. Its built-in sharing tool allows users to post comments on images, send messages, and share scans with colleagues in the form of secure links.
Rothberg invented the world's first DNA sequencing chip (Ion Torrent) and developed a treatment for metastatic breast cancer that is still in use today. He said his work on ultrasound was inspired by MIT physicist Max Tegmark. Tegmark assumes that a system with thousands of antennas can measure energy more efficiently than any transducer. Rothberg believes that this transducer can be used for ultrasound imaging.
With the help of Tegmark's blessings and his graduate student Nevada Sanchez, Rothberg and a team of about 50 scientists, developers and engineers developed the back of iQ based on the research of Pierre Khuri-Yakub, a professor at Stanford University. technology. Although it took eight years of research and development time, Butman, the chief medical officer of Butterfly, insisted that it was worth waiting for. He has enough reason to say this. When testing iQ three years ago, he found that he had a tumor under his tongue—a squamous cell that he thought was an overactive lymph node.
The first batch of equipment began shipping today to thousands of customers who booked them. Rothberg hopes to work with non-profit organizations and universities to bring it to developing countries. To this end, in April of this year, Butterfly and a Brown University ultrasound team conducted iQ testing in the intensive care unit of the Kenyan hospital.
They plan to sell more than 250,000 devices in the next 18 months, but Butterfly is already working on two new products: a patch that uses ultrasound to monitor patients and an ingestible pill that observes cancer from the body. Rothberg believes that one day the company's platform will replace the stethoscope.
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