Now, suppose you were on a farm in the Outback. How long would it take you to get to the doctor or the doctor to come to you?
Does anyone listen to their own heartbeat with a stethoscope? I just don’t believe that it is something that people do.
If we are talking about a technology that is intended to meet such rare needs, then it will probably remain expensive. Just not that many people will want to buy it. I agree with others that it may be helpful to doctors in remote areas, but ordinary consumers? Not seeing it.
It is easy to listen to the heart beat with a sthethoscope.
An ultrasound is different. It’s not just placing the probe above the organ. You need to know exactly what the picture should look like before you see it. The probe you use, probe angle and use of transducer fluid make a difference. Then you need to adjust many other settings such as gain, depth, frequency, etc. to get something worth interpreting. Most of the images produced with ultrasound are noisy and not medically useful.
A random “hold the probe over the liver” and waggle it back and forth will not likely result in anything useful when you send it to the radiology technician. Except in an emergency where a radiologist is directing someone who can’t be in a health centre, I can’t see any efficencies in sending a bunch of images to the doctor unless the ultrasound user was already skilled in using ultrasound.
Of course, for non-medical uses it might be fun to play around with. And it would be cool to follow a pregnancy or play around with ultrasound images in general. Just don’t expect the results to be that useful without lots of practice and knowledge.
I wonder if this becomes cheap enough, could you use it for other non-invasive probing?
I’d really like something that would let me see behind my drywall.
Into the next apartment?
ETA: BTW that already exists.
https://walabot.com/diy
I don’t think misdiagnosis will be a huge issue, we are very close to the age when AI can diagnose a medical scan better than a human doctor. They already do this in pilot studies, and I’m sure in another decade anyone who has one of these scanners will also have access over the cloud to a very advanced AI to make sense of the scans.
I think decentralization of medical scans and medical diagnostics is going to be big in the next decade. Not just portable ultrasound, but using NIR light scans and EIT, various diagnostic tools to diagnose infections and blood samples, programs where you input symptoms and they output a diagnosis, etc. All of which will work with smartphones. People can already buy at home EKGs for $100. That trend will continue.
The big benefit though will be seen in the third world where people are poor and there is a shortage of trained medical professionals. Anyone who has basic training can provide medical care in that environment of cheap scans, smartphones and AI. I could see health care advancing rapidly in rural parts of the third world in the next decade due to all this.
Combine that with the potential for 3D printing of chemicals, and maybe in the next decade or so people in rural parts of the developing world can diagnose a disease and then print the drugs to treat it by themselves in a rural village. Of course who knows how long until remote surgery gets to these areas too though.
Not too long.
“The RFDS uses a wide range of contemporary emergency medical equipment to provide aeromedical retrieval services. These include transport ventilators, critical care monitors, infusion devices, point-of-care testing, portable diagnostic ultrasound and a range of other splints and devices.”
Ultrasound is very far from AI automated reads, in large part because quality of images is so dependent on the operator. As other have said, you can put it over random parts of your body but unless you know what you’re doing and what you’re trying to obtain, the interpretation of any image is going to be extremely limited. One of my residents actually bought one and I used it during rounds to place an arterial line for BP monitoring. It was semi-useful but screen size on a phone was too small. Maybe on a tablet it would have been better? In any case, more affordable medical technology is always great, but this is definitely not meant for the untrained.