When a patient goes into a clinic for an ultrasound of their stomach, they lie down on crinkly paper atop an exam table. A clinician spreads a thick goo on their abdomen, then presses a small probe into it to send acoustic waves into the patient’s body. These waves bounce off their soft tissues and body fluids, returning to the probe to be translated into a 2D image. As the probe moves over the person’s stomach, a blurry black-and-white picture appears onscreen for the clinician to read.
While ultrasound technology is a staple in many medical settings, it is often big and bulky. Xuanhe Zhao, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, aims to miniaturize and simplify the entire thing—and make it wearable. In a paper published today in Science, Zhao and his team describe their development of a tiny ultrasound patch that, when stuck to the skin, can provide…
