INHUD: Intelligent Handheld Ultrasound Device

Handheld ultrasound offers practical and cost-effective diagnostic imaging to health professionals working in areas that today are not using ultrasound. One of the main reasons adoption of ultrasound is low among general practitioners, paramedics, physiotherapists, in emergency room or nursing homes, is the amount of training required to efficiently use ultrasound clinically. This project aims at developing good visualization solutions that can assist new or inexperienced ultrasound users in the efficient use of handheld ultrasound, both for navigating anatomy, localizing organs, and highlight clinical features in the ultrasound image that are relevant for diagnosis. The project will to a large extent use artificial intelligence, and the target is to have solutions running on mobile devices (phones, tablets) with a wireless connection to a handheld ultrasound device. The initial phase of the project has established a framework for assessing the precision of inertial measurement units for mobile use and the performance of machine learning libraries available for mobile platforms, and have demonstrated a proof of concept on how artificial intelligence can be integrated in a mobile app for ultrasound examinations. The project have also demonstrated a proof of concept where artificial intelligence is automating image quality testing of the ultrasound scanner in manufacturing, in order to achieve cost effective manufacturing with reliable product quality.

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Creating images of the interior of the human body is a crucial ingredient to modern medical diagnostics. Unfortunately, equipment for such medical imaging is typically bulky and expensive to buy, operate, and maintain. At points where care is given most frequently, such as at the general practitioner’s office, in an ambulance, emergency room, or a nursing home, medical imaging is therefore largely absent today. While small, portable ultrasound scanners could revolutionize this situation and bring affordable and side-effect-free ultrasound to the point of care, widespread adoption of such devices has not happened yet. This is mostly due to the large amount of training required to confidently operate ultrasound scanners, which poses an unreasonable investment for less experienced, occasional users. The vision of this project is to create an Intelligent Hand-held Ultrasound Device – INHUD – that visually assists healthcare professionals with little or no ultrasound experience in the device’s operation and in their clinical decision making. Our ambition is to offer a new hand-held imaging solution which opens the door to ultrasound for occasional users and provides significantly increased productivity and diagnostic confidence also for more experienced ones. The most important R&D challenges we together with our partner SINTEF expect to address in this project are - to gain a spatial understanding of the scanned area, - to perform intelligent full-body anatomy labelling in scanned ultrasound images, - to intelligently visualize regions of medical interest, - to provide visual aid for probe handling to the user, - and to do all that without noticeable lag with respect to probe movement. - to utilize the developed labeling technology to gain productivity in the manufacturing environment by implementing more efficient system test procedures based on artificial intelligense.