Improving maternal health worldwide
Every mother wants to be healthy for her baby, but in many rural areas childbirth is a dangerous business. In the US about five hundred mothers die every year during childbirth. In Africa it’s around 280,000. That’s tragic, because it so preventable. Ultrasound imaging can help identify the mothers at risk, those where the placenta extends over the birth canal, the baby is in a breech presentation or there are multiple babies, thereby alerting healthcare providers to seek the right care. We can help make that happen.
I’m Scott Smith, a physicist in Imaging Technologies Lab, and the principal investigator on a recent Grand Opportunity grant from the National Institutes of Health on Point-of-Care Ultrasound for Improved Maternal Health. Ultrasound has become the most commonly used medical imaging exam worldwide, because it combines real-time images, non-ionizing radiation, and relatively low cost. In fact, after riding Moore’s Law for several decades, we can now make imaging consoles the size of writing tablets or something that you can fit in your pocket (see the recently announced Venue and Vscan) instead of washing machines. Costs have come down too, by more than ten times. No matter how big the console is, all the diagnostic information is coming from the transducer in the probe – a thin sandwich of piezoelectric material that converts electric signals into ultrasound waves and vice versa, along with polycrystalline and polymer materials painstakingly assembled by hand and then carefully cut into segments only slightly wider than a human hair. These probes have not changed nearly as much as the consoles, and they haven’t gotten cheap. I’ve spent a lot of time squinting through a microscope working on these devices, and wanted to find a better way.
Over in the Material Systems Lab, Prabhjot Singh and his colleagues had been developing Digital Micro Printing, an adaptive additive rapid prototyping system for ceramics and polymers. Together we teamed up with ceramicists from the Ceramics and Metallurgy Lab and worked out the rudiments of Digital Micro Printing for a high sensitivity piezoelectric, the heart of ultrasound probes. Using this technology we can eliminate the delicate cutting step during transducer fabrication.. That’s what caught the attention of the NIH. Projecting out a long way, we can even envision printing the transducer on a roll to roll system, like the OLED team has done. This could really help reduce the cost of ultrasound probes. We still have a lot of details to work out, but I’ve learned not to underestimate people with imagination, knowledge, and commitment to change the world. Because they are the only ones that ever have.
Coupling cheaper probes with miniature consoles, could help lead to ultrasound equipment being more available not only for maternal health, but also in rural clinics, emergency vehicles, and individual doctor’s offices. It’s a great example of leveraging advanced manufacturing to lower cost leading to more access and better quality healthcare worldwide, not just imagination but healthymagination at work.
