No need for big machines to scan your whole body here is the smallest solution

Mumbai, March 18: What a smartphone can do? It can be used for what? Usually, people say to play games, songs, videos, internet purposes or to use any app etc but do you know that your smartphone can act as a medical instrument?

Entrepreneurial engineer Jonathan Rothberg suddenly became popular and rich after he made the world’s first DNA sequencer on a chip called the Ion Torrent back in 2011. In the years since then, Rothberg founded and led a new startup called Butterfly Network, which recently unveiled a new device called the iQ, which is equipped with an artificial intelligence (AI) that allows you to perform an ultrasound with a smartphone.

Essentially, the iQ is a lab-on-a-chip medical imaging tool that make ultrasounds accessible to all. You don’t need to be a lab technician to figure out how to operate the iQ. It simply attaches to an iPhone’s lightning jack, and its machine learning algorithms help the user find what he or she is looking for.

 

The iQ is also revolutionizing a more than 40-year-old technology. Almost all regular ultrasounds use compressed charged crystals or ceramics to send out a sound, pick up an echo, and calculate distance to form an image — pretty much like how bats navigate.

For the iQ, Butterfly’s engineers replaced these crystals with capacitive micromachine ultrasound transducers (CMUTs). These are rows of incredibly tiny drums that vibrate at a range of frequencies when a current is run through them, depending on the electrical power.