Show HN: An open-source ultrasound imaging dev kit side project
murgen.echopen.org
murgen.echopen.org
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2010/02February/Pages/Warning-over-so...
Brilliant to see you doing it though, and I'd be fascinated to see it paired with AI to make swifter diagnoses in order to cut down the length of exposure required for various measurements.
This is an overstatement of the available evidence. The link you post says so itself:
> These studies have found no evidence that ultrasound affects mortality around the time of pregnancy or birth, or has any effect on childhood cancers. In randomised-controlled trials there has been ‘weak evidence’ that it may affect whether a child is right or left handed (known as handedness), which the reviewers say may be the result of confounding, rather than actual causation.
I cringe when I read well-meaning but irrelevant warnings like the one you gave. To me, these warnings are somewhere between naysaying and spreading FUD. The NHS wants to make sure that millions of people don't take unnecessary ultrasounds, since a tiny risk, multiplied by millions, equals a few unnecessary deaths/left-handed children. The individual risk of unnecessary ultrasounds, however, is extremely low compared to the usual risks of pregrancy and childbirth.
Many medical devices are unnecessarily expensive (and suprisingly badly designed, from a user-interface standpoint). There are already enough regulatory hurdles in place that prevent disruption of the medical device markets, let us not add to these hurdles by being overly cautious!
And the concern with the device in the link is that it's an unregulated ultrasound device which could, in the hands of someone well-meaning but ill-advised, deliver a dose of ultrasound far in excess of that deemed safe by regulators.
That being said, open source medical hardware is quite a new field, and lot of aspects need to be matured.
The point is, lack of evidence is no reason to assume a non-invasive procedure is safe. There should be many "hurdles" in place to prevent unsafe medical devices. This is an area where very few consumers can analyze the risk.
Do you actually have evidence of any large amounts of harm this did to people?
This attitude is why people don't use vaccines. Fear. It overall hurts the population.
The difference here is that we know how both of these things work.
We know that ultrasound machines can cause warming and cavitation, and while these effects are minor when part of an ultrasound at the doctor's office, it's not hard to see how a homemade device that emits more radiation than necessary could exacerbate those effects.
The NHS warns against un-needed tests because of the risk of false positive results and un-needed treatment. The test itself has minimal risk, but most treatment has some more risk.
I've read about ultrasound induced bubbles destroying tiny amounts of tissue - probably not a huge individual risk like you say, but at the same time not one worth taking for vanity baby scans, and at scale of millions of people doing it the risks might play out for some unlucky babies.
Having said that, I think this project is wonderful. There are so many uses for ultrasound.
How can anyone be assured that this thing isn't transmitting too much energy into the tissue being imaged?
It is VERY IMPORTANT to consider power delivery. Ultrasonic pulses are also a commonly used for lysing bacterial cells during protein purification -- essentially turning cells to mush. If, in your DIY project, you accidentally "turn it up to 11" (don't know the acutal power level threshold and do not want to find out) -- You could also turn your own cells to mush. Here is an example of ultrasonic cell preparation equipment (200 Watt range): http://www.hielscher.com/ultrasonic-lysis-cell-disruption-ex...
So. Please pay attention to the safety concerns of ultrasonic imaging, do all of your testing on fruit and use a high quality bench top regulated power supply.
Importantly, how many transducers are you planning on using? I understand typical medical ultrasound uses a phased array with hundreds of transducers. That's what drove up my friend's cost estimate.
What you can do with a single transducer, though, is listen to a baby's heartbeat using the Doppler effect. (You can buy a fetal Doppler device on Amazon for about $40, that could be a good reference for calibrating your power output to make it reasonably safe.)
It's never worth exercising the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle is epistemologically invalid: you can never know, much less prove, that something is "safe." The precautionary principle would have confined us to the caves, if not to the trees.
In more modern times, for example, it's been used to fight nuclear power plants that might harm some people at some point, in favor of coal-fired plants that definitely do.
There are valid reasons to be concerned about the effects of high-intensity ultrasound and warn potential builders of this gadget about them... but that's not the precautionary principle in action, just common sense.
</pet_peeve>
I've just been looking at your github repository, you mention you use the HV7360 chip to generate the ultrasound pulse.
I'm slightly confused by the datasheet for this chip, am I right in thinking you supply +/- 100V to this chip? If so, what are you using to generate that voltage out of curiosity?
(I have a ~2MHz ultrasound transducer which I keep meaning to play with, to attempt to measure liquid density, so your project is very interesting to me!)
However, unlike the technology used in most hospitals across the UK costing anywhere from £20,000-£100,000, the scanner created by Jeff Neasham and Research Associate Dave Graham at Newcastle University can be manufactured for as little as £30-40. [0]
If thats true, it can be game changer in some developing countries.
[0] - http://echopen.org/index.php?title=Article:_Low_cost_design_...
We were following the Newcastle project, but I guess the tech was finally bought by NDT -> image quality and framerate were not as good as expected. At least, haven't seen progress on medical imaging use from this end.
For medical images, ezDICOM may work ?
http://www.bc.edu/clubs/mendel/ethos/archives/2008/younger.s...
> These counterfeit medical professionals lure in clients with advertisements outside their clinics stating, “pay 500 Rupees now and save 50,000 in the future”. Parents can spare a lot of time and future hardship by terminating the pregnancy early and trying again for a son in lieu of having to kill a newborn child. The clinics have proven so profitable, that ultrasound machines are even finding their way into rural villages that do not have potable water (Kumar 1998).
Still, an issue.