By coupling a disruptive technology, Digital Micro-Printing (DMP) with advances in miniature, low-cost electronics, the project team will improve access to Point-of-Care ultrasound for Maternal Health thereby reducing healthcare disparities, and enabling substantial reductions in maternal mortality worldwide. Driven by advances in electronic miniaturization and computing power, medical ultrasound is trending toward smaller, portable, lower cost systems with real-time volumetric imaging capabilities. These new attributes will enable more portable, battery powered imagers and monitoring units that reduce disparities in diagnostic healthcare by extending diagnosis outside the traditional hospital environment and especially among previously underserved populations. For example, if universally available in Africa portable ultrasound could detect placenta previa that currently accounts for more than 50,000 maternal deaths annually. While Moore's law is driving these advancements in system performance, commensurate progress in ultrasound sensor technology has lagged, thereby limiting the rapid adoption of ultrasound imaging in remote settings worldwide. Today the associated ultrasound transducer arrays are fabricated by dicing piezoceramic raw material into one-dimensional or two-dimensional structures. While this method is the standard one, it requires very long processing times. The benefits of ubiquitous ultrasound diagnosis and monitoring will not be fully realized unless simpler, flexible probe fabrication methods become available. The team has begun exploring an additive-layer, photoetching fabrication process we call Digital Micro- Printing (DMP) that offers drastic increases in manufacturing speed and improved resolution. In addition, DMP enables the fabrication of novel transducer geometries that lead to simplified ultrasound system architectures and further reduced cost. The proposal aims to develop the capabilities of DMP for the construction of ultrasound transducers. If successful, there becomes an economic impetus to extend DMP to a high throughput, continuous process with fully automated sensor fabrication and further reduced costs. Finally, the project will validate the benefits of this new probe with high-quality, portable imaging consoles in the lab, and with a consultant obstetrician in a clinical environment.
(provided by applicant): The broad goal is to make ultrasound imaging as pervasive for Point-of-Care applications as other simple diagnostic equipment, like stethoscopes, by reducing the costs of specialized equipment. We will focus this effort on probes for maternal and fetal health where death rates in parts of Africa exceed 15% and where the US maternal death rates are ten times higher than in parts of Western European. The team will develop lower cost versions of such instruments by coupling the dramatic decreases in size and weight that have become available in ultrasound consoles with a new, additive lithographic manufacturing technology Digital Micro-Printing (DMP) that when fully developed is especially suited to ultrasound probes. These probes will be substantially lower cost and easier to build with automated equipment.
