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Butterfly raises $250M for portable full-body ultrasound scanner
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- drtse4 8y agoLooks similar to the Philips Lumify: https://www.lumify.philips.com/web/ https://www.lumify.philips.com/web/
- nixgeek 8y agoOne-time purchase cost of Lumify is closer to $8,000 USD or a $199/mo subscription (which leaves you never owning the transducer). At $2,000 this is a lot cheaper which will hopefully drive wider deployment. Even in more developed countries, wider-scale use of imaging would be amazing: primary care being able to directly use ultrasound without referral to a specialist, and with smart image analysis, could cut diagnosis times significantly. In my case I waited 3 weeks for an US appointment on the NHS and that could have been avoided entirely.
- car 8y agoThe Butterfly Networks US requires a $39/mo. subscription for the cloud data storage, at least for the first year. Not sure after that.
- pragone 8y agoWell, point of care ultrasound (which is what the butterfly is for) can often lead to formal ultrasonography to be read by a radiologist. However, it can increase time to initial treatment, and depending on the level of skill of the user can sometimes prevent the need for formal ultrasound, but not always.
- walshemj 8y agoTrue enough but would your GP have the specialist knowledge for all possible uses of ultrasound is the real issue.
- JohnWatsman 8y agoThey are also lowering the bar for knowledge required to successfully operate the probe: "Computer vision algorithms ingest footage from the handset’s camera and detect the probe’s location in real time, directing users through augmented reality (AR) prompts precisely where to position it. (Butterfly calls it “Tele-Guidance”.)"
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Herodotus38 8y agoVery excited for this, I try to use bedside US daily in my hospitalist work but the portable US in my hospital is on a heavy cart and having to use elevator vs stairs makes it not worth it. Also, the article makes the common typo writing HIPPA instead of HIPAA. Otherwise great article.
- paulddraper 8y ago> writing HIPPA instead of HIPAA Ouch. You'd think in 2018 spellcheck would have solved this for newspaper.
- nothrabannosir 8y agoTangential but interesting: conventional spell checks, in my experience, tend to turn off for all caps words, or words that start with a capital. Turning it on always can be annoying, so you need something smart, which detects common errors, but doesn't hose you with false positives. Tangential to this tangent: Google Docs spell check catches wrong use of "flower" vs "flour" based on context. Try this: open a new doc, type: Flower No error. Now add: Flower, eggs, sugar Error on flower. But if you do: Flower, sugar, eggs No error. Milk also works. ML? Or regex?
- ganonm 8y agoThey probably use a bloom filter and populate it with a bunch of 'probably spurious' word pairs. The combination of 'Flower' and 'eggs' will evaluate as 'probably spurious' but the combination 'flower' and 'sugar' evaluates as 'not spurious'. This is probably a manually populated bloom filter of common spurious word pairs. For reference, a bloom filter is an extremely space efficient, probabilistic data structure that acts a bit like a set and can answer the query 'does the bloom filter contain this entry'. The bloom filter will respond with either 'definitely not' or 'possibly/probably' depending on how it is tuned. You could conceivably automatically populate this (still hardcoded) bloom filter by doing a brute force language corpus search for heavily correlated word pairs that have one or more of the two words having phonetically similar misspellings. E.g. 'sea' and 'breeze' would be heavily correlated. 'Sea' has a phonetically identical misspelling 'see'. You could then automatically add 'see + breeze' as a spurious pairing to the filter.
- canada_dry 8y agoFinally a shipping low cost ultrasound device (not just hype/promises). This is a game changer for the 3rd world.
- marknadal 8y agoI have been recommending this system to people for over a year now after first discovering it. It probably single handedly is one of the best startups to invest in. Just months before hearing it, my pregnant wife and I were researching how hard ultrasound devices are to build, and were very surprised at how ultrasound can be used to detect/diagnosis an insane amount of common illnesses. The hardware and physics behind ultrasound isn't nearly as technical or as advanced as you may think, and nowadays it is mostly a software issue. Combine the imaging with personal baselining and machine learning across similar body types fitted to 3D human model templates, you'd get Star Trek's medical scanner. The technology here could be used to eliminate 99%+ waste and inefficiency in the medical industry, effectively bankrupting the current institutions and disrupting the industry with better, cheaper, healthier, less-annoying care. This is a future we should be fighting for.
- Aardwolf 8y agoWhat can it and cannot detect compared to MRI, CT and xray? I know it's used for pregnancy, never saw other contexts for US so far, so would of course love to know if this will have more applications more easily available! > The cloud storage service to which images are uploaded is AES 256-bit encrypted and SOC II certified Um... Encrypting with aes 256 is easy. But will the keys be properly handled?
- JshWright 8y agoIt's useful in a ton of situations, here are just a few examples: In a cardiac arrest patient, it's useful to know if the heart is actually moving or not (i.e. you may be seeing electrical signals on an EKG, but the heart isn't physically responding). It's also useful to look for a buildup of fluid around the heart, called cardiac tamponade (which squeezes the heart and prevents it from working effectively). In trauma patients, a "focused assessment with sonography for trauma" or "FAST scan" is a quick way to check the common sources of major internal bleeding (which can provide useful guidance for treatment decisions in a very time sensitive setting). It's also useful for "routine" stuff like the placement of IVs. Ultrasound can be used to positively identify and locate veins that are otherwise difficult to feel through the skin.