Project Lead(s): Sanjoe Jose
Issue
Ultrasound has now become an extension of the clinical examination at the point-of-care for many conditions in many high-income countries.
Although ultrasound is important in the diagnosis of several emergency situations, this essential tool is not available to most people in low-resource settings who could benefit from it.
Solution
This project proposed to design a low-cost ultrasound scanning system that can be used with a smartphone.
An appropriate ultrasound probe was selected, and drivers and image processing reverse-engineered and interfaced with a low-cost smartphone to achieve basic functionality for an ultrasound scan system.
The concept is to make ultrasound accessible to peripheral health clinics using a USB ultrasound probe connected to a smartphone and linked to a remote cloud server.
The first step in reverse engineering the probe was to understand the nature of raw USB data being transmitted to and from the probe.
The commands that passed to the ultrasound probe to start and stop scanning operations using windows software from the probe vendor (H1.exe) were analyzed and a prototype was designed to read the scanned data from the probe to a file.
Outcome
A prototype ultrasound device was developed, but the results were not promising.
Preliminary field testing was conducted to understand the usability of the ultra sound scanning system but the quality of the images was poor.
Significantly more research needs to be undertaken to improve the image quality without losing useful image data.
Another challenge was the ability of the phone to handle the processing load. Unless a high-end smartphone was used, the phone would hang up during operation.
Further optimization will be required to overcome these challenges.
The project is expecting significant support from the National Rural Health Mission in India and a few foundations/NGOs that are active in rural healthcare to support pilot deployments.
The current probe manufacturer in China is willing to support the necessary customizations of the probe, as per requirements.
An estimated $2 million is required for the next phase of the project.