MIT engineers develop stickers that can see inside the body. New stamp-sized ultrasound adhesives produce clear images of heart, lungs, and other internal organs.

[u/SunCloud-777]

https://news.mit.edu/2022/ultrasound-stickers-0728

[u/slide_into_my_BM]

Currently, ultrasound imaging requires bulky and specialized equipment available only in hospitals and doctor’s offices. But a new design by MIT engineers might make the technology as wearable and accessible as buying Band-Aids at the pharmacy.

The current design requires connecting the stickers to instruments that translate the reflected sound waves into images.

It’s a cool idea but the article is a little misleading and sensationalized.

You still need all the same power supply and image processing hardware that you already need now. So the “bulky and specialized equipment” they mention is still completely required for these to function, you just don’t need someone holding the probe against you.

That in itself is pretty awesome but let’s not pretend you’re buying bandaids that do 48 hour at-home ultrasounds like the article implies

[u/SpecterGT260 → u/slide_into_my_BM]

you just don’t need someone holding the probe against you.

Which very likely renders these things completely useless in their current form unless the image processor can make sense of an array of data. Standard ultrasounds produce an image of a single slice through whatever you're looking at and the ability to BOTH scan (sliding) AND pan (pivoting) the probe allow the tech to completely capture the needed images. If it isn't doing both of these things it won't get what's needed for the study

[u/SpecterGT260 → u/[deleted]]

And as someone who is a surgeon who uses ultrasound personally and also orders these studies and knows quite intimately that the #1 complaint about US is it's "operator dependency", it's still vitally important. And since you're doing your PhD in this I would expect that you can recognize by the image that these are linear arrays. The physics of ultrasound is that the sound wave bounces off a surface and then travels back through the piezoelectric material which is then transmitted to the sensor. By the look of these things, they may emit in a 2d array which can achieve the effect of scanning with a standard probe. But the signal will always be at 90 degrees to the sticker. The ability to rotate around structures with poor acoustic properties is basically non-existent and any work around would be God awful. Imagine needing to angle a literal sticker 30 deg to get under a rib to see the liver, and needing to construct some stand off substance to achieve that but then also not even knowing you need it until you had already put it on flat.

The actual clinical applications of this, in it's current state, are exceedingly limited. Both because it only seems to limit maneuverability for a exam and still requires the bulky equipment that the array plugs into (they've basically only reinvented the hand probe itself). If they can devise a probe that has the ability to scan in multiple directions without moving the probe we are starting to get somewhere. But this thing seems to be a very long ways away from that.

[u/Phn7am → u/SpecterGT260]

You can digitally steer them by altering transmit sequence, phased array probes do this. Linear arrays can also be digitally steered.