The company that is really killing it in this space right now is https://www.butterflynetwork.com/
Last I heard the place is still going although most of the people I worked with have left already.
EDIT: Back then we were eyeing up using MEMS technology instead, though I don't think anything happened with that.
That said, in cattle I found (with a bit of vet coaching) it wasn’t hard to recognise follicles, distinguish from (and gauge size of) a corpus luteum, etc by manual palpation, at least for someone who AIs reasonably regularly anyway.
Our vets seem no less accurate this way than with their expensive heads-up toy! (I doubt I’m as accurate - I don’t get anything like the practice they do - but very handy for quick sanity check.)
https://www.mdedge.com/fedprac/avaho/article/98510/oncology/...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41378-018-0022-5
Disclosure: one of the co-inventors in the article was my graduate supervisor. I had no relation with this work however.
> For patients not covered by health insurance, the cost of a pelvic ultrasound typically varies by provider and geographic region. The typical cost range is $250-$1,100, with a national average cost of $525, according to NewChoiceHealth.com[1] . For example, Concierge Medicine[2] in California charges $275 for a pelvic ultrasound
The times I’ve used them, the original bill was so outrageous I fumed for days.
Insurance paid ~$15K and they billed me for my entire OOP max for the year ($7,500) for a service that cost about $400 tops to provide.
Contested the bill and they do a medical review of the coding. They had billed as “intensive care” the administration of a single shot and a standard blood count.
They actually came back and claimed the coding was correct! Kept fighting it for about 6 months and they ended up dropping the entire thing at no cost. But they still got to keep the insurance payout.
Just another form of price gouging / variable pricing which should be illegal.
This is in Croatia, so what gives? Pay scale for doctors are around 4x as much at Stanford Hospital, and machines cost about the same, Croatia also has a higher tax, but bay area has higher costs. ~60x higher costs? I don't think so, nor do I remember it so. I don't remember Palo Alto having any better basic medical services than here in Croatia either. Was that the price for ultrasound alone? Sounds outrageous.
Call it a medical procedure, and run it through a radiologist, and the cost shoots up 10x minimum. So where is all the money going?
Using Philips Lumify, Clarius' C-3, and other transducers, I think we've seen a bit of what low cost ($1k - $10k range) ultrasound machines with the same form factor can do to the market. Rather than displace the whole market, low cost ultrasound created a new fragment and opened doors for more clinicians and more clinical applications. The higher end machines are still regularly used and sought after (you can't really get the image quality and amazing beamforming otherwise).
I do like the idea of implantable ultrasound heart monitor! Fun to think about.
Disclosure: one of the co-inventors in the article was my graduate supervisor. I had no relation with this work however.
The ADCs and other analog stuff might be more of a hurdle, the design of them is quite hard, they aren't able to take advantages of smaller transistors as well, and competition in the space is decreasing as semiconductor companies keep merging (e.g. Analog Devices and Linear Technologies).
[0]: https://www.mouser.de/ProductDetail/Lattice/LFE5UM5G-25F-8MG...
ndt - non destructive testing
Although I think 3d imaging will work in a more convenient manner for that purpose, and it will only get cheaper, so I doubt it will become that popular for that purpose if it was made cheap.
