Butterfly iQ – A cheap handheld ultrasound tool with AI smarts inside

Perspective from an emergency doctor. Many comments ask if non-medical persons would use ultrasound should it become affordable. I think not.<p>There aren’t enough common medical conditions that you would monitor with a personal ultrasound[1]. Also it’s a tough skill to learn without a solid background in anatomy. This would deter many.<p>Primary care doctors (eg family, internal, and emergency medicine) will benefit most from affordable ultrasound. We are learning that it’s a powerful diagnostic tool when used along side the physical exam. Some zealots have equated bedside ultrasound to be the biggest advancement to medicine since antibiotics. This notion I feel is exaggerated, but— it taps into the underlying excitement in the medical community for bedside ultrasound.<p>Here are some sample cases.<p>Patient came in with all the symptoms and findings of a stroke— altered mental status, inability to move their left arm. Before giving the treatment for a stroke, a potent blood thinner called tPA, the doctor decided to do an informal ultrasound of the patients heart. He found the patient had a massive dissection of their aorta. The patient wasn’t getting adequate blood flow to their arm or brain. Had the patient been given tPA they most likely would have died. A quick bedside ultrasound revealed a difficult diagnosis and saved the patients life.<p>Another case- a young female came in unresponsive and without a pulse. Her husband said she had complained of belly pain for the past several days but nothing else. While doing cpr we placed an ultrasound on her abdomen and saw a massive amount of blood in her belly. A pelvic binder was applied and we immediately started massive transfusion for presumed ruptured ectopic pregnancy. In this case the easy access to ultrasound gave us a diagnosis in under a minute.<p>Both of these cases occurred in the emergency department. Of all specialties I think emergency medicine has been quickest to adopt bedside ultrasound. Other fields however could benefit too. Ultrasound is underutilized in family medicine and internal medicine clinics. Making it affordable, say close in price to a stethoscope, should encourage its use in these specialties and lead to more discoveries of its use as a diagnostic aide.<p>1. patients with an abdominal aneurysm may wish to monitor its size with a personal ultrasound. This seems extreme.

I’m sure doctors are looking forward to ultrasound scanners being common household devices, and getting 50 emails a day from panicked people convinced that their gallbladder is a tumor.

Engineer at Butterfly Network here, very excited to see interest on HN. As you can imagine, we are hiring, there are a lot of very interesting open opportunities <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;careers.smartrecruiters.com&#x2F;4Catalyzer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;careers.smartrecruiters.com&#x2F;4Catalyzer</a>

As someone who just had an ultrasound, I think this is the right direction. I had to goto a diagnostics center where they specialize in scanned imagery. I go in, paperwork, wait, wait some more, get scanned, and leave. The technician just had me hold my breath while she put some jelly on my abdomen and moved the device around. Once in a while she would take ultrasound pictures. Snap, snap, move, breath, snap.<p>My GP had me go in order to troubleshoot a blood test. Now, if the GP had this device it would have saved me some time and effort, not to mention the external factors such as gas, taking up space on the road, and an appointment.<p>So yeah, please, GPs everywhere, load yourself with these devices as they become cheaper and cheaper.<p>edit: GP&#x27;s to GPs

&gt;He also ran into difficulties with transmitting the images to the hospital’s database for storage. “And saving those images is required to bill for the scan,” he notes.<p>I think this guy is missing the point. Seems like the goal is to make giving an ultrasound so easy that it would be silly to charge for it. Just like the doctor doesn&#x27;t (or at least shouldn&#x27;t) have a special charge to listening to your chest with a stethoscope.

Can someone with a better understanding of the medical industry comment about the quality of this device? It seems like a small portable ultrasound device would be a great thing for diagnosis. But I understand there are all kinds of issues that might not be obvious to people without a strong medical background.<p>Is this as good as it seems, or are there features this lacks which prevents it from being that useful in the hospital setting?

So how to stop people from taking this discreet, inexpensive ultrasound device to China where parents will pay a lot of money for a black-market ultrasound to be told the gender of their fetus?<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shanghaiist.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;12&#x2F;ultrasound-van.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shanghaiist.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;12&#x2F;ultrasound-van.php</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.havocscope.com&#x2F;cost-for-illegal-ultrasound-and-abortions-in-china&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.havocscope.com&#x2F;cost-for-illegal-ultrasound-and-ab...</a>

This is absolutely interesting to veterinarians. Many veterinarians would use this as an adjunct to the physical exam. In human med, the follow up of conditions like mitral valve insufficiency is covered by insurance but in vet med, it gets expensive going to the recommended cardiology visits paying out of pocket. Plus, we can use ultrasound for a lot of routine and emergency procedures. I signed up right away.

There are already a number of mobile ultrasound devices, including ones that plug into phones and tablets.<p>As someone who&#x27;s actually done a few ultrasound courses, depending upon what you&#x27;re trying to image it&#x27;s not easy. It&#x27;s not just about having the device, years of medical training come into play.<p>Also, the mobile devices have significantly lower resolution and don&#x27;t seem to be super important in the hospital.

The interesting question is who&#x2F;what does the diagnosis. I&#x27;ve had my kids fall over a bunch of times (with a couple broken bones in there - <i>never</i> ambiguous, sadly) and broken a couple bones in my life too (as well as done stuff that convinced me that <i>something</i> must be broken in there, when nothing was).<p>So I think there were essentially zero times when a cheap-hand-held ultrasound in that home would have added information. The question is really whether this could be enormously helpful to a GP? Can they be trained usefully to take over some of the role of an ultrasound technician and do first-line diagnosis? It&#x27;d be great to not have to do the standard schlep over to the diagnosis place, wait around, get the thing done, and wait to get the results back to the GP or specialist.<p>I imagine there&#x27;s also a fair bit of computer &quot;vision&quot; work on this stuff too - I would presume people are working feverishly away on ways of reconstructing 3D imagery and actual diagnoses of an image via computer, as opposed to squinting at these mysterious pictures.

This is absolutely interesting to veterinarians. Many veterinarians would use this as an adjunct to the physical exam. In human med, the follow up of conditions like mitral valve insufficiency is covered by insurance but in vet med, it gets expensive going to the recommended cardiology visits paying out of pocket. Plus, we can use ultrasound for a lot of routine and emergency procedures.

I saw no mention if they removed the ability for it to sex a fetus, if they haven&#x27;t it will be a tool for aborting female babies.

They should sell these at a huge discount in exchange for an agreement to share imaging data and eventual diagnosis back to the company, as training data for their AI. An AI that could identify medical issues on an ultrasound with greater accuracy than a doctor would be worth a fortune -- and genuinely make the world a better place.

I know it&#x27;s been studied extensively, but doesn&#x27;t fda and others still advise caution about frivolous use?

Another great medical device that piggy-backs on an iPhone is the FDA-approved spirometer Wing:<p>Http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mywing.io

There is a lot of hate in these comments for this being a surprisingly cheap and potentially disruptive technology.<p>I was just having a lengthy discussion with an ultrasound technician last week. He himself admitted that:<p>1) The classes he found for free on YouTube were just as good as his technical training and certification.<p>2) These new smaller devices are actually superior to the older&#x2F;larger machines because the signal is processed locally rather than remotely (on the machine through the cable). He said he regularly has to deal with interference&#x2F;noise from the cable itself.<p>The $2K price point is half anything else I have seen on the market. But I also suspect they&#x27;ll be able to get this 10X cheaper within 4 years.<p>If nobody bothered doing this, this was going to be on my bucketlist of companies to start. It has massive potential, I&#x27;m glad somebody else is paving the way though.<p>Finally, medical imaging like this has already been proven to be a sweet spot and a hotbed for the modern day AI wave (even if we have another winter, it is the right tech for the right time). Similar fields, such as skin conditions, etc. has seen AI expertise trained and accurate well beyond even first world doctors.<p>This is a game changer for sure.

Very good! I&#x27;m looking forward to this high-end gadget future. Also stumbled today over Lumu Power[1] which I will probably acquire.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lu.mu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lu.mu</a>

What is the point of this, at all?

It won’t do a damn thing in the USA since it “can’t” be used for diagnosis. The incumbent industry will make sure it is not approved.