Mobisante revolutionises mobile medical imaging: MobiUS
You’re the general surgical registrar on overnight and a patient with non-specific abdominal pain presents to the emergency department. There are no ultrasound machines available for your use, you need to reach a diagnosis, and computed tomography is out of the question seeing the patient is young…..
Stethoscopes have come a long way since their invention in France by René Laennec in 1816, from the crude, trumpet-like device to those now with built-in cardiac sound recognition software. Mobisante, a Washington-based medical technology company, has invented the potential “successor” to the stethoscope: MobiUSTM a portable ultrasound probe coupled with a smartphone.
The world’s first portable ultrasound-smartphone device was FDA approved in January 2011 and has won multiple commendations by the New England Journal of Medicine, heralding it as the next thing to dramatically change clinical medicine, decrease medical errors, improve diagnostic capability and patient care. The full package consists of a smartphone with an 8 GB Micro-SD memory card and one transducer (multiple supported transducers are available for various uses). Users are able to share images via email, USB or MMS depending on the capabilities of the smartphone and the network.
There is, however, a big catch: the smartphone you use needs to have a USB 2.0 port in order to connect the transducer. Sailesh Chutani, CEO of Mobisante, predicts that MobiUSTM will be available for the Android platform of smartphones in the near future, however those siding with Apple will have to eagerly wait.
