Saturday, February 11, 2023

Wearable ultrasound Patch images and monitors the heart

Good news! Amazing stuff!

"A wearable ultrasound patch, the size of a postage stamp, can take images of the heart and monitor its performance even during strenuous exercise.
The device, described in the journal Nature, offers a portable alternative to bulky imaging machines and allows continuous, real-time assessment of heart function.
Currently, cardiac function can only be assessed through either imaging or continuous measurement, not both together. ..."

From the abstract:
"Continuous imaging of cardiac functions is highly desirable for the assessment of long-term cardiovascular health, detection of acute cardiac dysfunction and clinical management of critically ill or surgical patients. However, conventional non-invasive approaches to image the cardiac function cannot provide continuous measurements owing to device bulkiness and existing wearable cardiac devices can only capture signals on the skin. Here we report a wearable ultrasonic device for continuous, real-time and direct cardiac function assessment. We introduce innovations in device design and material fabrication that improve the mechanical coupling between the device and human skin, allowing the left ventricle to be examined from different views during motion. We also develop a deep learning model that automatically extracts the left ventricular volume from the continuous image recording, yielding waveforms of key cardiac performance indices such as stroke volume, cardiac output and ejection fraction. This technology enables dynamic wearable monitoring of cardiac performance with substantially improved accuracy in various environments."

Wearable Patch Images Heart | Inside Precision Medicine



Fig. 1: Design and characterization of the wearable cardiac imager.


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