What’s the last time you used film in your camera to shoot that Kodak moment?
The answer may range from never to a decade and a half ago depending on how old you are. Semiconductor chips have made taking photos a snap, but they have also made prices of digital cameras more affordable.
However, the world of medical imaging, including that of ultrasound, has remained rather firmly entrenched in the world of piezoelectric crystals. And that’s what Butterfly Network, the healthcare unicorn, wants to forever change.
“We think what we’ll replace is the fundamental technology that powers these equipments in the same way that the digital camera sensor replaced film camera,” said Gioel Molinari, president of Butterfly Network, in a phone interview late last year. “
Butterfly Network makes the handheld Butterfly iQ probe along with software services and began shipping the product at the end of October. While Molinari won’t say that how many of theses cheaper, handheld ultrasound devices have sold or whether it can replace the more expensive capital-intensive ultrasound equipment, he is sure of one thing.
“The bottom line is that we don’t expect that any of those new systems will be using piezoelectric crystals pretty soon because we expect the underlying technologies to change toward higher-performance, lower-cost, more-manufacturable solution,” he said.
The probe, called the Butterfly iQ is able to scan the entire body and allows doctors to do a variety of things for which previously they had to rely on several different pieces of equipment. One physician who reports being “enamored” with the device ever since he tested it last year is Dr. Elias Jaffa, an ER physician.
“With a probe as versatile as the Butterfly iQ in my pocket, I can do everything I could hope to do with a full complement of probes — place lines, understand a patient’s cardiopulmonary status, guide fluid resuscitation, identify internal bleeding in trauma patients, and guide procedures of all kinds — all with a single probe that I always have with me,” raved Dr. Jaffa, assistant director of emergency ultrasound at Duke University Hospital, in an email.
Jaffa, who has bought his own Butterfly iQ as of late October after testing it, said he has no financial relationship with the Guilford, Connecticut company. He added that he has used other handheld devices but prefers this even though the image quality could be improved. The other handheld device Jaffa used to use until he switched to the Butterfly iQ is the Philips Lumify.
“Believe it or not, pocket-sized ultrasound systems have been around for years, and there are some that get better quality images than the iQ does currently,” Jaffa wrote. “What makes this product such a quantum leap is the fact that you now have a probe that has the functionality of three different probes all in one device at a price that a single physician can pretty easily justify — most of us probably already have laptops that cost nearly the same.”
The Butterfly iQ costs $1,999 with a monthly user fee of $35. Compare that with the Philips Lumify that is listed on Amazon for $9,000. The devices have differing capabilities though both fall under the category of portable ultrasound.
Aside from the cheaper price tag, the functionality that attracted Jaffa comes partly from the device’s companion mobile phone app. Molinari explained that convenience factor in a bit more detail.
“You have an iPhone and you tap just two taps with your thumb and you can go from a cardiac scan to a shallow carotid scan. That’s something that would take several minutes typically with a traditional system requiring changing probes adding gel etc and so … it makes it a completely different experience than the traditional products — even the traditional existing handheld products,” he declared.
While the actual device appears to be in a category of its own, Molinari also believes that the software services component of Butterfly iQ is what makes the device truly valuable. A new generation of medical device companies are as much, if not more, about the data and the services capabilities than the actual widget and Butterfly Network is no exception.
“We are a full-stack solution to medical imaging,” Molinari pointed out. “The hardware platform is one-third of the solution actually.”
So what capabilities does the service component provide? There is, perhaps predictably, an artificial intelligence component to the Butterfly iQ story. The technology has been taught to interpret images such that even a less proficient user of the device can make the correct image interpretation. Here’s Molinari again:
“The AI aspect deals with making ultrasound essentially both consistent and easy to use for less experts removing the operator variability,” he said. “Acquisition assistance is one aspect of the AI and then image interpretation is the other aspect of AI and together they make the product easy to use and accessible.”
Molinari stressed that this new device is not simply a boon for doctors but also for patients who can be imaged right from their bedside in the hospital or in an office setting. Contrast that with the cold, clinical environment of an imaging lab.
“That’s such a powerful thing to be able to see inside your own body and do it with your doctor. Very low-pressure environment either bedside or in an office as opposed to an imaging lab and there’s several papers that have been written recently and published about the benefits of point-of-care bedside ultrasound for patient experience and how it improves the connection between doctor and patient in a way that hasn’t existed since the stethoscope essentially,” he said.
A few months into shipping a much-anticipated product, the proof of course will be in actual adoption. With $350 million raised till date, including a large $250 million round, the company has enough capital to put to work in order to convince physicians that individual point-of-care diagnostics powered by ultrasound-on-a-chip technology is the wave of the imaging future.
Photo: Butterfly Network
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