Moving Ultrasound from the Lab to the Living Room

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what is a video worth? In medical diagnostics, a whole lot more. A still image captures a moment, but continuous imaging provides much more valuable information. Consider the heart: a brief ultrasound provides a valuable snapshot, but it fails to show how the heart adapts to the stresses and rhythms of a full day. This data gap often means early signs of illness go undetected. Currently, capturing long-term ultrasound data is nearly impossible because the machines are bulky, expensive, and require a skilled technician to manually hold a probe in place.

A research team at MIT is working to change that reality — starting with breast cancer screening. The group has developed a compact, low-power 3D ultrasound system that could make frequent, accessible breast imaging feasible not only in clinics, but potentially in homes and rural settings as well. Their work, recently published in Advanced Healthcare Materials, is a big step toward portable, wearable ultrasound technology.

While routine mammograms remain the standard for breast cancer screening, tumors can develop in the months between annual scans. These so-called interval cancers account for roughly 20 to 30 percent of breast cancer cases and are often more aggressive. Early detection is critical: survival rates approach 100 percent when breast cancer is caught early, but drop sharply at later stages. For people at high risk, more frequent screening using ultrasound could make a lifesaving difference.

At the core of the new system is a miniaturized ultrasound probe, slightly smaller than a deck of cards, paired with a data acquisition and processing module about the size of a smartphone. The probe uses a novel “convolutional optimally distributed array” design, reducing the number of transducer elements from more than a thousand to just 128, while still enabling wide-angle, high-resolution 3D imaging. This dramatically cuts complexity, power consumption, and cost.

The system also introduces a chirped data acquisition (cDAQ) approach, which replaces traditional high-voltage ultrasound pulses with continuous, frequency-modulated signals. This technique boosts signal quality and imaging depth while operating at much lower voltages and power levels. In practice, the device can image tissue more than 11 centimeters deep, with sub-millimeter resolution, and consume nearly 30 times less power than conventional systems. It can even run on a standard 5-volt power supply, such as a battery.

In early testing, the researchers used the system to image breast cysts in a human subject, successfully producing gap-free 3D images of the entire breast from just two or three probe placements. Because the probe rests gently on the skin rather than pressing into tissue, the images also avoid distortion.

Looking ahead, the team envisions an even smaller version of the electronics — potentially fingernail-sized — paired with a smartphone for image display and AI-guided positioning. Ultimately, the goal is a wearable ultrasound device that enables frequent, operator-independent monitoring at home.