Capacitive Micro-machined Ultrasonic Transducers (CMUT) ultrasound imaging
Capacitive Micro-machined Ultrasonic Transducers (CMUT) ultrasound imaging
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One of the students from my Coffee Can Radar course looked me up in the fall of 2011, inviting me to see a presentation about a company he was working on. Attending this presentation in the hotel suite were a few local professors and Jonathan Rothberg. I was asked what I thought of the presentation. My suggestion was to incrementally move the design forward proving each concept; mechanical (synthetic) prototype, switched array, and finally fully array with digitization on all channels. Jonathan said, 'You're hired.' I told him i didn't need a job, until one of the profs in the room took me outside to explain who he was and his previous success with Ion Torrent. That is how I ended up as a co-founder at Butterfly.
As a 4 Catalyzer co-founder and second employee I was responsible for leading the initial proof of concept prototypes which were a series of rack-mounted high-channel-count ultrasound systems, built the first lab, hired the initial tech team.
We then worked to miniaturize by developing a single-chip ultrasound system (aka ultrasound on a chip); my role in this was to develop the first proof of concept CMUT MEMs transducer elements and once those worked our first CMUT array which the team used to acquire our proof of concept imagery.
First CMUT array
First time we were able to get the CMUT array to function.
Early Imagery testing the first CMUT array
The success of this first imagery with our own array lead to a $100M fundraising round, and in this interview with MIT Technology review you can read some of my opinions on things.
In acknowledgement of making this first CMUT array work, I was then asked to 'do the same thing you did at Butterfly' and jumpstart another company under 4Catalyzer, Hyperfine Research Inc.
In the years since my involvement a fully integrated imaging device was developed with more and more sophisticated CMUT elements and arrays. All of this work culminated in a series of Point of Care Ultrasound (POCUS) product releases.
You can order your own Butterfly imager online. Butterfly is traded on the NYSE as $BFLY.
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