The Butterfly handheld ultrasounds are also in use in a Texas hospital system, helping patients when it comes to IVs.
The Butterfly devices were created to help solve the problem of access to diagnostic imaging, but also to be a low-cost, portable and durable option for clinicians so they can get answers right away when treating their patients.Perhaps among the most important benefits, it can help health care workers discover high-risk conditions early during pregnancy - potentially saving a mother and baby's lives.
That's something that would be useful, for example, before a catheterization, where health care workers need to know bladder volume."It has AI embedded such that a provider can be a new learner for ultrasound, and go through a walkthrough of how to scan the heart, or how to scan the lung, and then see their own images with AI labeling for all of the anatomy," she explained.
"This means that a little less than half of our counties do not have a birthing hospital. They don't have a birth center as well as they do not have an obstetric provider meaning an OB/GYN family medicine doctor who delivers babies, or a certified nurse, midwife," said Alicia Lee, the director of the Maternal Child Health Collective Impact at March of Dimes.
"So there's this big lag time, and there's also a physical space issue, where the patient has to leave the clinician taking care of them, go to see a sonographer who makes pictures," Shah said. "The pictures get read by the radiologist, and then that feeds back to the clinician. And so there's a big-time lag in getting that information."