
Butterfly raises $250M for portable full-body ultrasound scanner - prostoalex
https://venturebeat.com/2018/09/27/butterfly-raises-250-million-for-portable-full-body-ultrasound-scanner/
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marknadal
I have been recommending this system to people for over a year now after first
discovering it. It probably single handedly is one of the best startups to
invest in.

Just months before hearing it, my pregnant wife and I were researching how
hard ultrasound devices are to build, and were very surprised at how
ultrasound can be used to detect/diagnosis an insane amount of common
illnesses.

The hardware and physics behind ultrasound isn't nearly as technical or as
advanced as you may think, and nowadays it is mostly a software issue. Combine
the imaging with personal baselining and machine learning across similar body
types fitted to 3D human model templates, you'd get Star Trek's medical
scanner.

The technology here could be used to eliminate 99%+ waste and inefficiency in
the medical industry, effectively bankrupting the current institutions and
disrupting the industry with better, cheaper, healthier, less-annoying care.
This is a future we should be fighting for.

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Herodotus38
Very excited for this, I try to use bedside US daily in my hospitalist work
but the portable US in my hospital is on a heavy cart and having to use
elevator vs stairs makes it not worth it.

Also, the article makes the common typo writing HIPPA instead of HIPAA.
Otherwise great article.

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paulddraper
> writing HIPPA instead of HIPAA

Ouch. You'd think in 2018 spellcheck would have solved this for newspaper.

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nothrabannosir
Tangential but interesting: conventional spell checks, in my experience, tend
to turn off for all caps words, or words that start with a capital. Turning it
on always can be annoying, so you need something smart, which detects common
errors, but doesn't hose you with false positives.

Tangential to this tangent: Google Docs spell check catches wrong use of
"flower" vs "flour" based on context. Try this: open a new doc, type:

    
    
      Flower
    

No error. Now add:

    
    
      Flower, eggs, sugar
    

Error on flower. But if you do:

    
    
      Flower, sugar, eggs
    

No error. Milk also works.

ML? Or regex?

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ganonm
They probably use a bloom filter and populate it with a bunch of 'probably
spurious' word pairs. The combination of 'Flower' and 'eggs' will evaluate as
'probably spurious' but the combination 'flower' and 'sugar' evaluates as 'not
spurious'. This is probably a manually populated bloom filter of common
spurious word pairs.

For reference, a bloom filter is an extremely space efficient, probabilistic
data structure that acts a bit like a set and can answer the query 'does the
bloom filter contain this entry'. The bloom filter will respond with either
'definitely not' or 'possibly/probably' depending on how it is tuned.

You could conceivably automatically populate this (still hardcoded) bloom
filter by doing a brute force language corpus search for heavily correlated
word pairs that have one or more of the two words having phonetically similar
misspellings. E.g. 'sea' and 'breeze' would be heavily correlated. 'Sea' has a
phonetically identical misspelling 'see'. You could then automatically add
'see + breeze' as a spurious pairing to the filter.

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dswalter
I think Google has pretty good deep learning-based word prediction for their
Swype-style Android keyboard.

There was a period, maybe 1.5 years ago, during which text input prediction
got substantially worse, then gradually improved. Along with the change came
the ability for text input to change the estimated word after you entered the
next word, using the combination of your entries to both words to estimate
both simultaneously.

If they have language models which perform that task at a level worth pushing
out to consumers they can do some smoothing of entries in a list.

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drtse4
Looks similar to the Philips Lumify:
[https://www.lumify.philips.com/web/](https://www.lumify.philips.com/web/)

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nixgeek
One-time purchase cost of Lumify is closer to $8,000 USD or a $199/mo
subscription (which leaves you never owning the transducer).

At $2,000 this is a lot cheaper which will hopefully drive wider deployment.

Even in more developed countries, wider-scale use of imaging would be amazing:
primary care being able to directly use ultrasound without referral to a
specialist, and with smart image analysis, could cut diagnosis times
significantly. In my case I waited 3 weeks for an US appointment on the NHS
and that could have been avoided entirely.

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walshemj
True enough but would your GP have the specialist knowledge for all possible
uses of ultrasound is the real issue.

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JohnWatsman
They are also lowering the bar for knowledge required to successfully operate
the probe:

"Computer vision algorithms ingest footage from the handset’s camera and
detect the probe’s location in real time, directing users through augmented
reality (AR) prompts precisely where to position it. (Butterfly calls it
“Tele-Guidance”.)"

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Aardwolf
What can it and cannot detect compared to MRI, CT and xray?

I know it's used for pregnancy, never saw other contexts for US so far, so
would of course love to know if this will have more applications more easily
available!

> The cloud storage service to which images are uploaded is AES 256-bit
> encrypted and SOC II certified

Um... Encrypting with aes 256 is easy. But will the keys be properly handled?

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JshWright
It's useful in a ton of situations, here are just a few examples:

In a cardiac arrest patient, it's useful to know if the heart is actually
moving or not (i.e. you may be seeing electrical signals on an EKG, but the
heart isn't physically responding). It's also useful to look for a buildup of
fluid around the heart, called cardiac tamponade (which squeezes the heart and
prevents it from working effectively).

In trauma patients, a "focused assessment with sonography for trauma" or "FAST
scan" is a quick way to check the common sources of major internal bleeding
(which can provide useful guidance for treatment decisions in a very time
sensitive setting).

It's also useful for "routine" stuff like the placement of IVs. Ultrasound can
be used to positively identify and locate veins that are otherwise difficult
to feel through the skin.

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jjeaff
It's also commonly used for diagnosis of kidney and bladder issues like
looking for kidney stones.

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canada_dry
Finally a shipping low cost ultrasound device (not just hype/promises). This
is a game changer for the 3rd world.

