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“Earlier this year, vascular surgeon John Martin was testing a pocket-sized ultrasound device developed by Butterfly Network, a startup based in Guilford, Connecticut, that he’d just joined as chief medical officer,” Antonio Regalado reports for MIT Technology Review. “He’d been having an uncomfortable feeling of thickness on his throat. So he oozed out some gel and ran the probe, which is the size and shape of an electric razor, along his neck.”
“On his smartphone, to which the device is connected, black-and gray images quickly appeared. Martin is not a cancer specialist. But he knew that the dark, three-centimeter mass he saw did not belong there,” Regalado reports. “‘I was enough of a doctor to know I was in trouble,’ he says. It was squamous-cell cancer.”
“The device he used, called the Butterfly IQ, is the first solid-state ultrasound machine to reach the market in the U.S.,” Regalado reports. “Martin, who since diagnosing his cancer has undergone a five-and-a-half-hour surgery and radiation treatment, believes the devices can take on new shapes, like a patch that could be sent home with patients. Perhaps before too long a parent might diagnose a kid’s fracture at home. ‘To look at this as just an ultrasound device is like looking at an iPhone and saying it’s just a phone,’ he says. ‘If you have a window into the body where anyone can afford it, everyone can use it, and everyone can interpret it, it becomes a heck of a lot more than an ultrasound device.’”
Read more in the full article here.
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