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Even diagnostic ultrasound has been implicated in foetal brain damage (through cavitation). And ultrasound operators are known to often suffer from damage in their dominant hand. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.7863/jum.2009.28...
> ultrasound operators are known to often suffer from damage in their dominant hand. Do you have a citation for this? I don't see anything about it in your link.
Seems worth mentioning that incorrectly used an ultrasound can burn bones. (Specific frequencies in bony areas moved too slowly). I didn't do enough research to understand this (but just enough to verify it). I learned it initially from my wife who's an NP. When I mentioned a previous DIY ultrasound article to her she looked skeptical and mentioned the risk of bone burns.
I have never heard of this being an issue for diagnostic ultrasound. Since I’m trained in (cardiac) ultrasonography, I think this would have come up... I also did a brief lit search and didn’t identify any obvious examples. I suspect your wife is referring to therapeutic ultrasound, which can damage bone [1]. But this is not the ultrasound people are getting of their heart, abdomen, or pelvis in general. 1 = https://…
An amazing portable US is soon coming from Butterfly Network. The transducer plus DSP is on a very large integrated circuit, and it can do breathtaking stuff for a device of this size and cost, like real time Doppler US (show blood flow in the image). https://www.butterflynetwork.com
It's a real shame that larger FPGAs aren't yet supported.
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I have never heard of this being an issue for diagnostic ultrasound. Since I’m trained in (cardiac) ultrasonography, I think this would have come up... I also did a brief lit search and didn’t identify any obvious examples. I suspect your wife is referring to therapeutic ultrasound, which can damage bone [1]. But this is not the ultrasound people are getting of their heart, abdomen, or pelvis in general. 1 = https://…
US Bio effects of diagnostic US are discussed at (painful) length in undergraduate radiography training here in New Zealand. We are fairly well aligned with the UK in our training pathway but in my (limited) experience echo techs don’t seem to come from a radiography background while ultrasound ones do. Could be a local situation though. Broadly, the priciples seem to be ALARM and perhaps don’t do ‘souvenir’ scanning…
Cool project :) I just got back from shenzhen where I purchased a handheld ultrasound probe with built-in screen about the size of a really chunky smartphone for $1800 with wifi & connection to ios/android
I am very interested in hacking on some ultrasound projects. Do you know if what you have is available for online purchase anywhere?
Same origin: Shenzen. Very friendly contacts there, always a pleasure to chat with fabs.
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As in all engineering related choices, there are tradeoffs that make the decision between FPGAs and DSPs: Similarities: ->Both are specialty items, with specialty dev. environments and proprietary libraries. ->Both are designed to do fast processing of highly parallel data (DSPs are known as VLIW processors, at least in all of the architectures I'm familiar with). ->Both require knowledgeable specialists to really ge…
One thing that might tip the balance in 2018: there's a growing familiarity and body of open source knowledge now around fpga signal processing among the sdr community. There are now a lot of well documented open source fpga-based data acquisition boards being sold today at comparatively rock-bottom prices - we just call them sdrs. The bandwidth requirements for ultrasound would seem to fall easily within the open so…
My understanding is that the probes are the expensive part. The rest is added value, for sure, but there is something of a monopoly on high quality piezo crystals used in the probes. This ensures that the current players don't compete much on price.
It uses Project Icestorm which is absolutely great. So much better using an open source toolchain than the proprietary horrors that FPGA vendors inflict on us. I wrote a quick intro here: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/03/17/playing-with-picorv32-... It's a real shame that larger FPGAs aren't yet supported.