Picture a village in a lesser developed part of the world where the majority of births take place in the home. Despite the sometimes significant travel requirements and expense, a certain percentage of pregnancies are higher-risk, and so delivery should be performed in a hospital. Ultrasound imaging, of course, can help sort the routine pregnancies from the high-risk ones, but ultrasound equipment may not be readily accessible to patients who would benefit from the technology, especially patients in rural areas.
But what if the ultrasound equipment itself were “smarter,” and thus easier to use? Smart ultrasound may eventually enable a wider range of health care providers to perform scans and make ultrasound much more accessible in regions where healthcare services and technology are limited.
Developing this smart ultrasound will be the first task at hand for GE’s new Medical Electronic Device Realization Center (MEDRC), a collaborative alliance with The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Analog Devices. It’s part of GE’s Healthymagination drive to reach more patients with better health care globally.
“A radical change is taking place in how medical care is being delivered, with delivery moving to ‘point of care’ rather than having patients travel to a doctor’s office or hospital,” said Charles Sodini, LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT and co-founder of MEDRC. The new center will play an important role in this shift to point of care diagnostics.
MIT Professor Brian W. Anthony will lead the team, which will include graduate students Matthew Gilbertson, and Shih-Yu Sun. One promising avenue they will be exploring is engineering the equipment to aid the clinician in determining the amount of pressure to apply onto the patient’s body with the probe.
Other important goals for the ultrasound research and development are to establish new clinical applications, such as cancer diagnostics. But smart ultrasound is just the first step for the MEDRC, which will be looking for medical breakthroughs in electronic devices, diagnostics and treatments, and technologies that enable more information-driven healthcare systems.
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