Release date: 2015-07-31
Can single-chip ultrasound technology reduce the price of medical imaging so that everyone can afford it?
By holding an iPhone-sized scanner on your chest, you can see vivid 3D images of the human body.
This is a new medical imaging device sponsored by entrepreneur Jonathan Rothberg. Rothberg claims that he has raised $100 million to create this "cheap-free" innovative product that will increase the productivity of doctors by a factor of 100.
According to the description in the patent document, the technology relies on a new type of ultrasonic chip, which may eventually become a new method of using thermal energy to destroy cancer cells or provide information for brain cells.
Will this technology guide the future of medical imaging?
For Rothberg, using semiconductor technology to solve biological problems is already very familiar. Earlier, he sold his two DNA sequencing companies for more than $500 million: 454 and Ion Torrent Systems. With the huge profits from the sale of the company, Rothberg was able to enjoy life on his luxury yacht called Gene Machine and devote himself to the DNA sequencing problem of his own interest.
The new imaging system was developed by Butterfly Network, a company founded nearly three years ago. The company is part of the 4Combinator, a startup incubator created by Rothberg, and is one of the most advanced companies. The 4Combinator is designed to combine medical sensors with "deep learning" in artificial intelligence.
Rothberg did not disclose how the Butterfly device works or how it looks. “For details, please wait for the official release of the equipment. We will launch this product in the next 18 months,†he said. But Rothberg guarantees that the product will be small and priced at only a few hundred dollars; it can be connected to a cell phone to diagnose breast cancer or display images of the fetus.
As can be seen from Butterfly's patent application, the goal is to design a compact, versatile new ultrasound scanner that can create 3D images in real time. Lifting the device to the chest allows people to see the inside of the body through a "window".
The concept map submitted by the Butterfly Network to the Patent Office shows that the product is a small 3D ultrasound imaging device.
With $100 million from Rothberg and other investors, including Stanford University and Aeris Capital in Germany, Butterfly seems to be pushing the biggest bet on history to this emerging technology. This technique etches the ultrasonic transmitter directly onto the semiconductor wafer along the circuit and processor, and the device is referred to as a "capacitive miniature ultrasonic sensor", or CMUTs for short.
Most ultrasonic machines use small piezoelectric crystals or ceramics to generate and receive sound waves. But these must be carefully connected together and then connected to a separate box via a cable for signal processing. If ultrasonic components can be directly integrated on a computer chip, people can mass-produce them at a low price, and it is easier to create an array type that can generate 3D images.
“The idea of ​​this product has been around for a long time, and it has been waiting for someone to turn it from idea to reality.â€
In imaging trials, doctors use ultrasound more often, including viewing infant images during pregnancy, looking for liver soft tissue tumors, and more recently using sonic waves to warm cells to treat prostate cancer.
The idea of ​​making miniature ultrasonic chips dates back to 1994. At the time, at the suggestion of Stanford University professor Butrus Khuri–Yakub, Rothberg's company made the first miniature ultrasonic chip in history. Unfortunately, although both GE and Philips have shown a long-standing interest in it, the chip has not yet achieved commercial success. This is because they did not have reliable operations at the time, and mass production did have some difficulty.
"The idea of ​​this product has been around for a long time, and it has been waiting for someone to turn it from idea to reality." Berkeley, Calif., a startup that specializes in using ultrasound systems to make computers recognize human gestures, Chirp Microsystems, director of circuit design Richard Przybyla said, “Perhaps for a long time, it has been waiting for a large enough amount of money and a team that is focused enough.â€
Rothberg said his interest in ultrasound technology comes from his eldest daughter who is now in college; she has nodular sclerosis, a disease that causes seizures and kidney cysts. In 2011, he sponsored a medical trial in Cincinnati that was able to eliminate kidney tumors by heating high-intensity ultrasound pulses.
The test results made Rothberg firmly believe that this technology still has a lot of room for improvement. “Testing an MRI machine to view the tumor and heating it with an ultrasonic probe; the machine cost millions of dollars, but the speed is not so fast, it is more like a laser printer that takes 8 days to print, and the effect of the image It looks like the crayon drawing by my children," Rothberg said. "Since then, I have decided to make a 1000 times cheaper, 1000 times faster, and more accurate than this $6 million machine. 100 times higher product."
Rothberg claims that Butterfly's technology has a "secret", but he did not disclose what it is. It is speculated that it may be related to the smart device and circuit design that overcomes the physical limitations and manufacturing issues currently facing CMUT technology. One reason is because Nevada Sánchez, one of the company's founders, helped cosmologists design a much cheaper radio telescope. The signal processing technique applied by the device is called "butterfly network", which is the origin of the name of the startup company. The company's Greg Charvat is from the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he developed radar that can even see the inside of the human body through thick stone walls.
Sánchez and Charvat have shown the media a photo of a coin that can be meticulously presented with letters and numbers. The photo was taken with a prototype chip this spring. “Ultrasonic (industry) is still basically in the 1970s. General Electric and Siemens are also products of this old concept,†Charvat said. With the advent of new ideas such as chip manufacturing and radar, he said, "We can get faster images, wider field of view, and upgrade resolution from millimeters to micrometers."
Ultrasonic devices work by making a sound and then capturing the echo. It can also create a focused energy beam as an opportunity, and this chip-based device may eventually develop a new system that kills tumor cells. According to the latest findings, neurons can be activated by ultrasound, so such small devices can also be used to feed information back to the brain.
“When I have thousands of these pictures, I think they will be able to do something for Down syndrome or cleft lip patients; when people feel that time is tight, things often become impossible.â€
Rothberg said his first goal would be to introduce cheap imaging systems to the market so that the world's poorest corners could use it. He said that the system will rely heavily on software, including techniques developed by artificial intelligence researchers, and automate diagnostics by combing large numbers of images and extracting key features.
"We want it to be like the "panoramic" feature in the iPhone." He refers to a shooting function on a smartphone, where the photographer pans the device and gets an automatically generated composite panoramic image.
Rothberg also pointed out that in addition to cognitive objects and helping users find them, such as the fetal body parts in fetal testing, the system can also draw preliminary diagnosis based on pattern investigation software.
“When I have thousands of these pictures, I think they will be able to do something for Down syndrome or cleft lip patients; when people feel that time is tight, things often become impossible,†Rothberg said. "But I will let every technician do this."
In addition to Butterfly, Rothberg's incubators have begun investing in three other companies, each with $5 million to $20 million in seed funding. They are Lam Therapeutics, a biotechnology company that is developing a cure for tuberous sclerosis, Hyperfine Research, which has a high degree of confidentiality, and another company that doesn't want to be named.
Source: Arterial Network
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