Ossia, the RF wireless charging company, have received Part 18 approval from the FCC. The system needs a fixed transmitter and receiver, a receiver the size of 2 phones, barely receives a Watt, no-one can be within 20 centimeters of either, and is at the safety limit for power output. Their own publicity seems to downplay the system and instead focuses on unavailable mythical future products. Where do they go from here?
The basics of imaging require a certain number of elements. The acoustic window must be a certain size for the application, the elements must be smaller than a wavelength to avoid grating lobes (0.5 wavelength for perfect phased arrays in that regard). Divide one into the other, and you get a number of elements that's usually between 100 and 200.
On what basis do you make your statement that this is too many elements? IMO implies opinion, do you have any facts or physics to back up your statement?
I do appreciate being called a "condescending asshat", I might get a t-shirt with that on it, thanks.
I though my credentials were one paragraph instead of many, but maybe I need to count again.
As for lording it over you with qualifications - I just needed to make it clear that I actually do have a huge amount of experience in this area, otherwise instead of being a "condescending asshat" people would be asking who the hell do I think I am commentating on this.
I make no apology for knowing what I'm talking about, there's too many articles written by people with no idea about the topic.
And don't take it personally, I've something of a reputation in ultrasound for being blunt.
Quick answer - yes, GPUs are now reaching the point that they are becoming useful, but also imaging techniques such as superresolution methods, ultra fast imaging, and others, demand even more computation. I expect to see advancements in the next few years because of this, and at some point (maybe 10+ years from now), that GPU power will exceed the demand from ultrasound and even the highest end systems can use them for all needs. This is not lost on the community and they are working on exactly that kind of research.
Original post author here, thanks for your comments.
There is a robust second hand market for ultrasound systems and probes, just google for those companies or search on eBay.
There are also research platforms out there for imaging from various universities, some of which are open source. They aren't nearly as good as the commercial codes, but a few grad students can't compete against teams of full time professionals working for decades. Commercial codes are unlikely to be open sourced. Many are tied to the architecture of the systems, and most are reused in later systems and so are still useful decades later. It's highly unlikely that any company would open source them, it's just not how they operate.
As for explosions of technology and advances - yes, I do expect more advanced electronics and signal processing to have a large impact on ultrasound in the coming years, but it is more complex than most in this thread give credit for, and will take time to appear.
Because there are multiple competitors in the field, and you are a new entry. In order to be accepted as an unknown in a quality and results conscious market, you either have to be way better, way cheaper, or some combination of those.
If you are an established player, then you can sell for slightly less and get market share from your competitor. But in a competitive market, he is also smart and makes the system cheaper, then undercuts you, and on it goes until price reaches equilibrium at a much lower price point.
If you are in a monopoly position, then you can extract a premium profit until either the govt stops you with anti-trust, or a competitor appears who wants some of that profit. If you listen to everyone on this thread, ultrasound systems are easy to make so jump right in!
Ultrasound is an incredibly competitive market with multiple large players, each of whom has high quality technical teams and they compete for market share.
A 2 cent PZT buzzer is ridiculously far from an ultrasound probe, engineering wise, and your units are off by about three orders of magnitude. And soldering depoles PZT.
A transducer does not cost as much as a car (well, not a well made car), but a system does. That's the cart plus a number of transducers.
Yes, I only covered the transducer in that post, but as I noted, the systems and software deserve their own Pt II. It takes time to write this kind of stuff you know?
Your other points I try to answer in my updated blog post along with many others here in this thread.
Original blog post author here. Thanks to everyone for their comments, I've tried to answer as much of the issues raised as I can in a new blog post, here.
TL;DR summary - ultrasound engineers are not stupid, are adding capabilities as they can, and driving costs down, but demands keep rising as new applications are found, and there is not yet the "killer app" demand for ultrasound that will drive smartphone sized economies of scale to lower prices massively. Regulation is not a huge cost driver (and you seriously do not want no regulation), and there is no cartel action in ultrasound conspiring to keep prices high, it's actually an incredibly competitive industry.
Having been involved in designing and building ultrasound systems for a couple of decades, I thought I'd comment on this in a blog post for those looking for a little more detail on the issues involved in building and selling ultrasound devices for medical use.
A quick summary - they're not expensive, in fact for what you get they are remarkably inexpensive. There's a huge amount or work that goes into them, and the author of the original piece simply doesn't even know enough about the subject to realise he doesn't know what he's talking about.
I appreciate the comment, though I think the situation is often more nuanced - a junior employee may simply not have all the facts, and a more senior one may either have a 'gag order' on exit or worried that saying anything negative will affect their chances with future employers. Whistleblowers can end up harming their careers despite doing the right thing, and a halo doesn't pay the mortgage or buy the kids Christmas presents.
But onto Theranos - I just posted something on this at my blog. More than the employees, look at the Board of Directors and ask why they didn't do their jobs and enforce change. If they can't alter the ridiculous plans of the Founder/CEO due to the voting structure then they should resign. It's not their full time job, they won't go hungry if they leave, so what is their excuse for not speaking out?
Planning on doing 'Apple compliance testing' is a zero cost thing to do, and has no effect on getting a deal with Apple. People seem to read into this statement what they want it to say - given Energous is a publicly traded company and their statements are covered by SEC rules, then take what they say at absolute face value, no more and no less.