UltrasonOS

With over half a century of medical ultrasound support, proven efficacy, and increased popularity, why is it that over half our planet’s population does not have access to ultrasound imaging? In 2015 when I joined the doctoral program, I embarked to not only understand this problem but to provide a solution. This document will walk you through this journey, detailing the challenge of creating my very own ultrasound system with the purpose of it being highly accessible to people who need it the most. I had the vision to take this further; not only did I aim to create an open-source portable ultrasound- I also wanted to see this in the hands of users. This dissertation will show you how collaboration between students of varying disciplines can help propel research to the point of product development. A full ultrasound system including both hardware and software has been developed and tested using commercial ultrasound phantoms. This document will present progress chronologically, starting with the first attempts at using audible piezoelectric buzzers to generate a signal, where the first proof of concept is met. In this dissertation, you will follow the continuous development of a 1) ultrasound analog circuit, 2) mechanical transducer probe, 3) analog signal acquisition system, and 4) imaging software coupled with the user interface. The open-source portable ultrasound research has been successful in providing both hardware and software solutions, combined as a single package in an end-to-end integrated system. This has never been done before. During a time when “data is gold”, this project has also created an open platform where users can collect and share data, enabling collaborations and propulsion of open-access medical screening technologies. This research has developed the lowest-cost 3D scanning ultrasound transducer that we know of at this time. This is inherently novel and transcendental.