2K-1 A Hand-Held Ultrasound Imaging System for Point-of-Care Applications

As demands for point-of-care (POC) services have increased in and out of hospitals, more and more attention has been drawn to developing portable medical diagnosis systems with imaging capability. We have recently developed a prototype of PDA-type hand-held device which is designed to have the functions and portability required for POC applications by combining an ultra small ultrasound scanner and a full custom PDA using Linux as its OS. The prototype now only supports a phased array but was designed to support various probe types. It is powered by a Lithium polymer battery to achieve the maximum scanning time of about one and half hours. We will present the images obtained with the system and application results of other features. The images will be compared to images obtained from a commercial product using 32 channels in both transmit and receive