05.21.24-Leading-Edge-Webinar-Digital-Health-and-Wellness-Xuanhe-Zhao

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Video details
Continuous imaging of internal organs over days could provide unprecedented information about one’s health and diseases and shed new insights into developmental biology. However, this is unattainable with existing wearable devices. Here, we report a bioadhesive ultrasound (BAUS) device, which consists of a thin and rigid ultrasound probe robustly adhered to the skin via a soft, tough, anti-dehydrating, and bioadhesive couplant. The BAUS device provides 48-hour continuous and simultaneous imaging of multiple organs including blood vessels, muscle, heart, gastrointestinal tract, diaphragm, and lung for the first time. The BAUS device could enable diagnostic and monitoring tools for various diseases, including hyper/hypotension, neuromuscular disorders, cardiac diseases, digestive diseases, and COVID-19. The long-term time-series imaging data of multi-organ correlations could provide a new system-level insight into human physiology. I will conclude the talk by proposing two challenges in science, technology, and medicine: - Can we continuously image the full human body over days to months?
- Can we make ultrasound imaging an affordable wearable commodity for global health?
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Interactive transcript
MIKI KATO: Xuanhe is a professor of Department of Mechanical Engineering. And his research focuses on science and technology between humans and machines. A major current focus is the study and development of soft materials and systems. The title of his presentation today is Material Innovation for Ultrasound Patch. Xuanhe, take it away.
XUANHE ZHAO: Thank you so much. So this is a great pleasure to discuss our work on wearable bioadhesive ultrasound to this audience. I'm Xuanhe Zhao From MIT.
Conflict of interest-- I co-founded SanaHeal, Magnendo, Sonologi. I receive royalty from CIRS. I'll discuss results related to these companies.
This is the mission of my lab, merge humans and machines. The opportunity we see over the last century-- there are great advance in terms of understanding and engineering human body, modern biology, medicine, genetics. These are the examples. Similar in the domain of machines-- we see great progress in terms of semiconductors, electronics, computer, internet, AI. Now, next, it will be robotics. However, there is a huge gap in between. And my lab is trying to merge human and machine, let them work seamlessly.
Today, I'll discuss one example-- it's a wearable imaging-- how to merge human and machine to achieve wearable imaging. I'll begin this topic with wearable and stretchable electronics. This is an emerging field. People develop a thin, stretchable electronic devices who conform such devices on the skin so that such a thin, stretchable electronic devices can measure EKG, EMG, EEG, heart rate, temperature, sweat, many physiological parameters of the human. However, they cannot image deep internal organs. And we know how important it is to achieve such an imaging of deep internal organs for diagnosis and for monitoring.
Now, in the hospital, we do have such a capability. For example, ultrasound is the most widely used imaging modality. You go to hospital. The sonographer will use this handheld ultrasound probe to take a snapshot image inside the patient. The patient during this process is static. And the sonography need extensive training in order to take such ultrasound images.
Our vision is we want to convert such ultrasound imaging to be wearable-- you can wear it at home and the hospital-- and free. You don't need to hold it anymore. So it will be a patch or sticker on the body to take the imaging.
The imaging will be long-term, continuous instead of a snapshot. And the patient during the whole process can do all kinds of sports and body activities. And this process is also user-independent. Any patient can apply those ultrasound patches on the body themselves.
So that's our vision. And in terms-- to achieve that, these are technology breakthroughs. Number 1, we propose the idea of using a thin, rigid, and high-quality ultrasound probe. You can see this ultrasound probe is a thin patch, only a few millimeter thick. Then we use a soft bioadhesive coupling to adhere such ultrasound probe on different locations of the skin. That soft bioadhesive coupling can deform-- can conform to different locations of the skin and then integrate this thin, rigid, high-quality ultrasound probe to different locations of the body.
So that's number 1. Number 2, we know this acoustic wave is directional. So we need to optimize the imaging direction in order to achieve high-quality imaging of deep internal organs. How to tune the imaging direction? We develop this adjustable bioadhesive coupling so that we can adjust and tune this to the optimized direction to achieve optimized imaging, high-resolution, high-quality imaging of internal organs.
Then the third one is a thin, rigid, high-quality ultrasound probe. This ultrasound probe are based on piezoceramics. The piezoceramic will emit ultrasound wave to the body. And the reflected wave will be received by these transducers at the same time and then convert those signals into images.
We develop a 3D printing process to rapid prototyping-- low-power, high-resolution, ultrasound transducers. In one day, we can do 10 generations of fabrication and optimization of such a-- ultrasound transducers.
Here is the result. So the bioadhesive ultrasound transducer-- the power is only around 10 milliwatts. In comparison, your Apple watch-- the power consumption is on the order of 100 milliwatts. Because bioadhesive ultrasound probe is a mono-function, it's only for ultrasound imaging-- so the power can be even much lower than Apple watch. Then there is a battery size, a cellphone size battery. We can achieve long-term, continuous imaging of the body without recharging the device.
Then with that, we further develop this fully integrated, wireless, and portable control unit. So with this unit, we can connect those adhered ultrasound patch with the control unit. The control unit can further communicate with your cellphone to transmit the ultrasound images to your cellphone to achieve this closed-loop imaging of diverse, deep internal organs.
Let me show some results. So here is the process of applying this bioadhesive ultrasound on the neck of a student in a lab. Then the student turn on the tablet. You can see real-time imaging of carotid artery and the jugular vein of this student. The imaging quality is really clinical quality. This is comparable with point-of-care ultrasound devices.
You can see this student is moving the body, bicycling. You can still have this very stable, long-term, continuous imaging because we literally adhere the ultrasound probe on the skin to achieve this stable, high-quality, long-term, continuous imaging of different organ. So now the student is moving even faster. But you still have this stable, high-quality imaging.
Then with this, we achieve for the first time real-time imaging of the lung over 48 hours. What can be the potential impact? This will enable us to have long-term monitoring of COVID symptom of the lung at home. If anyone tests COVID positive, we can send the patient home and-- with such a bioadhesive ultrasound sticker. Then for the majority of the patient, you observe this thin pleural line parallel to A-line. That means no COVID symptom in the lung.
However, for very few patients, if you see this irregular pleural line, condensed A-line, that means lung infection. For those patients, they will receive a warning in their cellphone. They should go to hospital for early treatment of this potential COVID symptom of the lung. So that can be the potential impact.
Another one is blood pressure. We know 1 million adults globally has hypertension. Hypertension is the most important preventable risk factor for premature death. It's highly desirable to continuously monitor your blood pressure. However, we know how cumbersome the blood pressure cuff is.
Now, it turns out that your blood pressure is correlated with the diameter of your carotid artery. With that understanding, now we can adhere such a bioadhesive ultrasound patch on the neck to continuously observe-- image the carotid artery. And then with some AI algorithm, we can section this area of this carotid artery, use that to calculate continuous blood pressure waveform.
So here are some of the results. As a byproduct, we can also turn on the Doppler mode to measure the blood flow rate. You can see we can measure many potential parameters of the blood flow.
This is one result. This is my systolic blood pressure over 48 hours, long-term, continuous monitoring. You can see after some training, I have a spike on the blood pressure. Giving this talk, I'm nervous. There's another spike. Then I should either calm down or take some medication. These are the potential impact of a closed-loop mitigation or management of your blood pressure.
Another potential impact is that long-term, continuous imaging of cardiovascular dynamics. We know cardiovascular disease are number one cause of global death. Apple Watch made a breakthrough. They integrated EKG measurement into Apple Watch. However, EKG can only diagnose around 22% of heart attacks. For the majority of heart disease, you need an imaging modality-- for example, ultrasound imaging. Now we can achieve this long-term, continuous ultrasound imaging of the heart over 48 hours. Once you feel a chest pain or uncomfortable, you can send such images and the videos to clinician on demand for early diagnosis for early mitigation.
Another one is muscle. We can measure long-term, continuous image of the muscle. And you can see students love this because this can tell students how much exercise is sufficient or too much. We do not know this. But an ultrasound image can tell you exactly the optimal moment to stop the exercise. And even after exercise, you can continuous observe the evolution of your muscles, of your blood flow in the muscles. So these are the potential impact on sports medicine, rehabilitation, many other potential areas.
We can also measure the rigidity of organs because many diseases, such as tumor, such as acute liver failure, are correlated with the modulus change of the organ. Here we use acute liver failure as an example. You can see when this-- we use an animal model-- undergo the acute tumor failure, the Young's modulus increase over four times. With this bioadhesive ultrasound, we can quickly capture the onset of the acute liver failure for early treatment, early mitigation of such diseases.
Not only that-- because we do not need a hand to hold the ultrasound probe, we can literally adhere multiple patches to image multiple organs together simultaneously. So for example, this student is walking between Harvard and MIT. We measure the carotid artery, jugular vein, the heart, stomach, bladder, muscle simultaneous. And we observe very interesting correlations between these organs in daily activities. That's the potential impact of this technology.
So it turns out that this wearable technology can be as hot as genetic editing and artificial intelligence. This is the Altmetric score of the bioadhesive ultrasound paper after publication. It's similar to the Altmetric score, societal attention score, of a CRISPR by Doudna and the Charpentier's Labs. It's even similar to AlphaGO paper by DeepMind. So that's the potential societal attention.
We care more about leading clinicians' opinion. For example, Eric Topol commented, "It's a very impressive new frontier about how we can use ultrasound imaging continuously to assess multiple organs, organ system. It's a new window into the human body that we have never had before. This is anatomy. This is very different. We have never had a sensor with continuous anatomical imaging."
With that, then what's the next step? Here is our vision. And we are achieving this vision, I believe, in the next few years. We can develop personalized foundational model of the-- of body based on wearable imaging data and the AI. Now, with multiple ultrasound patches, we can obtain huge amount of imaging data in your daily activity. And that personalized foundational model can enable long-term, continuous health monitoring to monitor whether you deviate from this foundational baseline model. Early diagnosis intervention of diseases-- already discussed some examples. Observation of tumor development, brain development, fetal development, preterm birth, women's health-- I see some questions about women health-- indeed, we can achieve that.
What are the challenges? In terms of challenges, we are addressing these challenges one by one. Hardware-- we need a better miniaturization, low-power electronics, human integration, manufacturing. Software-- we need AI algorithm analyzing larger amount of time series imaging data, diagnosis, prognosis, and the full-body foundation model.
Clinical regulation-- FDA approval, data privacy. Timeline-- our goal is to make ultrasound a wearable commodity for global health in 10 years. And we are working very hard together with the startup company Sonologi to achieve this goal in the next 10 years.
Acknowledgment-- the research collaborator discussed in this talk-- Professor Qifa Zhou and Professor Hsiao Chuan Liu from USC. These are ultrasound elastography experts. Clinical collaborators over the last 10 years-- Professor Christoph Nabzdy from BWH, Aman Patel, MGH, Albert Kwon, Stanford Medicine, Aristidis Veves, BIDMC, Leigh Griffith, Mayo Clinic, Pablo Hawker, MGH.
These are not only collaborator. Eventually, they become co-founders, advisors of startup companies we co-founded. Of course, funding from NSF, NIH, and the Philips-- also, private donors to MIT Zhao lab. If you are interested in our research, if you are impressed by our vision, feel free to donate to our lab.
Then I want to propose another vision, merging humans and machines. The impact is not limited to wearable imaging. We'll have better health, better understanding of biology, and even future of the humans and society. We are achieving this vision not only by publishing papers. We license our technology to companies such as CIRS and converted them into FDA-approved major medical phantom in the US. And many clinicians were trained by our tissue phantom. Eventually, they help many COVID patients during this pandemic.
We are converting our bioadhesive technology through SanaHeal. Not only SanaHeal published papers in Nature. We also win Nature spin-off prize-- only one prize each year. We are converting our magnetic robot, soft robot technology, into Magnendo. And now Magnendo achieving this goal of remotely treat stroke patients. We are converting this or translating this wearable ultrasound technology through Sonologi. Thank you very much.
MIKI KATO: Thank you very much, Xuanhe. It was very great. And before looking at the audience question, I would like to ask a question related-- today's topics.
XUANHE ZHAO: Sure.
MIKI KATO: So to make your continuous imaging and ultrasound to be a wearable commodity widely used by people-- maybe you already explained. But what would be the most challenging things, including regulatory issues?
XUANHE ZHAO: Yes or no. So of course, regulation, data privacy, is one important challenge we are facing. However, because ultrasound is non-invasive, it's already being widely used in clinical applications. And the ultrasound we are talking about here is an imaging modality. So we have confidence we can achieve FDA approval in early stage. Actually, Sonologi is achieving FDA approval this year, hopefully.
So not only that, but because the ultrasound imaging that we are developing is long-term, continuous, and is miniaturized-- so we can achieve this even larger amount of data, enable capabilities that are unavailable in existing ultrasound systems. So that may enable new functionalities, such as monitoring. Traditional ultrasound is only for diagnosis. Now wearable ultrasound-- through Sonologi, we are achieving long-term, continuous monitoring. And these are foundational of human model.
MIKI KATO: Thank you. Next question-- considering this evolving capability for remote continuous monitoring and imaging, what are some of the most compelling use case you envision? Is there potential, for example, to improve health outcome in remote geographies?
XUANHE ZHAO: Very good question again. So the most important-- so there are-- well, the application of this wearable ultrasound technology will be achieved step by step. The first one is in hospital. So we can-- for patients in hospital, now we can enable this long-term, continuous monitoring of deep internal organs. So that's the first step. It's not remote, per se. But it's already enabled this long-term, continuous monitoring.
Then in the second step, indeed, we will deploy this for home-based use, deploy this in developing countries. And for that, we will achieve or receive this remote data. And for the majority of the data analysis-- will be done by AI. Then the clinicians will be in collaboration with AI algorithm for analysis of this remote data and the remote diagnosis. So this is a further vision. But we believe the technology are achieving this tipping point. Eventually, we can achieve this vision.
MIKI KATO: Thank you very much. Questions from audience-- have you tried to continuously monitor pregnant women with this technology?
XUANHE ZHAO: Thank you so much. This is a great question. We have not yet because the IRB approval for pregnant woman is another level. Currently at MIT, we only monitor healthy and certain patients, but not pregnant woman.
However, because the power of bioadhesive ultrasound is so low and it's only imaging modality, we believe there should be no major barrier to apply this to pregnant woman, even-- especially later stage-- these high-risk pregnant woman, for example, to detect preterm birth and to detect or monitor other conditions of those pregnant woman.
MIKI KATO: Thank you. Our next question is related-- ultrasound. Have you compared the detection performance with existing ultrasound system?
XUANHE ZHAO: Yes. So this is a good question. The question is about the performance of our bioadhesive ultrasound with existing ultrasound system. Because our technology is based on a thin, rigid, but high-quality ultrasound probe, through this bioadhesive coupling-- this is really a unique design of the system-- we can achieve the imaging quality of existing point-of-care ultrasound system. Indeed, we compare with many flagship point-of-care ultrasound system. We can achieve similar level of imaging quality.
But our goal is not limited to that. Our goal-- we want to achieve really clinical level. This is a large heart-based imaging quality. And the Sonologi and my lab are working towards that goal.
MIKI KATO: Next question is related-- other locations of the human body. Is this real-time bioimaging ultrasound applicable to monitoring eye cataract ripening and glaucoma effect?
XUANHE ZHAO: This is a very interesting question. My answer is we do not know. But if a conventional ultrasound has been used for such application, then we have confidence because we are based on, again, a thin, rigid, high-quality ultrasound probe. So we can make it a very high frequency to have high-resolution imaging. If conventional ultrasound can achieve that, then we can provide a long-term, continuous monitoring version of such ultrasound.
MIKI KATO: Thank you. Last question-- is it possible to use this for brain?
XUANHE ZHAO: Very good question. The answer is it's possible because in the domain of brain imaging, currently, there are already so-called functional ultrasound, especially to image blood vessels through some acoustic windows of the brain. So we believe we can convert such capability into a long-term, continuous, wearable version. So that's one possibility.
Another possibility-- for babies, for babies, especially in NICU, some of the bone of their brain is not closed yet. Then with those cases, we can easily image the brain for diverse monitoring and diagnosis applications.
MIKI KATO: Thank you very much, Xuanhe. If you are interested in his research, please reach out to your program director. Thank you very much.
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Video details
Continuous imaging of internal organs over days could provide unprecedented information about one’s health and diseases and shed new insights into developmental biology. However, this is unattainable with existing wearable devices. Here, we report a bioadhesive ultrasound (BAUS) device, which consists of a thin and rigid ultrasound probe robustly adhered to the skin via a soft, tough, anti-dehydrating, and bioadhesive couplant. The BAUS device provides 48-hour continuous and simultaneous imaging of multiple organs including blood vessels, muscle, heart, gastrointestinal tract, diaphragm, and lung for the first time. The BAUS device could enable diagnostic and monitoring tools for various diseases, including hyper/hypotension, neuromuscular disorders, cardiac diseases, digestive diseases, and COVID-19. The long-term time-series imaging data of multi-organ correlations could provide a new system-level insight into human physiology. I will conclude the talk by proposing two challenges in science, technology, and medicine: - Can we continuously image the full human body over days to months?
- Can we make ultrasound imaging an affordable wearable commodity for global health?
-
Interactive transcript
MIKI KATO: Xuanhe is a professor of Department of Mechanical Engineering. And his research focuses on science and technology between humans and machines. A major current focus is the study and development of soft materials and systems. The title of his presentation today is Material Innovation for Ultrasound Patch. Xuanhe, take it away.
XUANHE ZHAO: Thank you so much. So this is a great pleasure to discuss our work on wearable bioadhesive ultrasound to this audience. I'm Xuanhe Zhao From MIT.
Conflict of interest-- I co-founded SanaHeal, Magnendo, Sonologi. I receive royalty from CIRS. I'll discuss results related to these companies.
This is the mission of my lab, merge humans and machines. The opportunity we see over the last century-- there are great advance in terms of understanding and engineering human body, modern biology, medicine, genetics. These are the examples. Similar in the domain of machines-- we see great progress in terms of semiconductors, electronics, computer, internet, AI. Now, next, it will be robotics. However, there is a huge gap in between. And my lab is trying to merge human and machine, let them work seamlessly.
Today, I'll discuss one example-- it's a wearable imaging-- how to merge human and machine to achieve wearable imaging. I'll begin this topic with wearable and stretchable electronics. This is an emerging field. People develop a thin, stretchable electronic devices who conform such devices on the skin so that such a thin, stretchable electronic devices can measure EKG, EMG, EEG, heart rate, temperature, sweat, many physiological parameters of the human. However, they cannot image deep internal organs. And we know how important it is to achieve such an imaging of deep internal organs for diagnosis and for monitoring.
Now, in the hospital, we do have such a capability. For example, ultrasound is the most widely used imaging modality. You go to hospital. The sonographer will use this handheld ultrasound probe to take a snapshot image inside the patient. The patient during this process is static. And the sonography need extensive training in order to take such ultrasound images.
Our vision is we want to convert such ultrasound imaging to be wearable-- you can wear it at home and the hospital-- and free. You don't need to hold it anymore. So it will be a patch or sticker on the body to take the imaging.
The imaging will be long-term, continuous instead of a snapshot. And the patient during the whole process can do all kinds of sports and body activities. And this process is also user-independent. Any patient can apply those ultrasound patches on the body themselves.
So that's our vision. And in terms-- to achieve that, these are technology breakthroughs. Number 1, we propose the idea of using a thin, rigid, and high-quality ultrasound probe. You can see this ultrasound probe is a thin patch, only a few millimeter thick. Then we use a soft bioadhesive coupling to adhere such ultrasound probe on different locations of the skin. That soft bioadhesive coupling can deform-- can conform to different locations of the skin and then integrate this thin, rigid, high-quality ultrasound probe to different locations of the body.
So that's number 1. Number 2, we know this acoustic wave is directional. So we need to optimize the imaging direction in order to achieve high-quality imaging of deep internal organs. How to tune the imaging direction? We develop this adjustable bioadhesive coupling so that we can adjust and tune this to the optimized direction to achieve optimized imaging, high-resolution, high-quality imaging of internal organs.
Then the third one is a thin, rigid, high-quality ultrasound probe. This ultrasound probe are based on piezoceramics. The piezoceramic will emit ultrasound wave to the body. And the reflected wave will be received by these transducers at the same time and then convert those signals into images.
We develop a 3D printing process to rapid prototyping-- low-power, high-resolution, ultrasound transducers. In one day, we can do 10 generations of fabrication and optimization of such a-- ultrasound transducers.
Here is the result. So the bioadhesive ultrasound transducer-- the power is only around 10 milliwatts. In comparison, your Apple watch-- the power consumption is on the order of 100 milliwatts. Because bioadhesive ultrasound probe is a mono-function, it's only for ultrasound imaging-- so the power can be even much lower than Apple watch. Then there is a battery size, a cellphone size battery. We can achieve long-term, continuous imaging of the body without recharging the device.
Then with that, we further develop this fully integrated, wireless, and portable control unit. So with this unit, we can connect those adhered ultrasound patch with the control unit. The control unit can further communicate with your cellphone to transmit the ultrasound images to your cellphone to achieve this closed-loop imaging of diverse, deep internal organs.
Let me show some results. So here is the process of applying this bioadhesive ultrasound on the neck of a student in a lab. Then the student turn on the tablet. You can see real-time imaging of carotid artery and the jugular vein of this student. The imaging quality is really clinical quality. This is comparable with point-of-care ultrasound devices.
You can see this student is moving the body, bicycling. You can still have this very stable, long-term, continuous imaging because we literally adhere the ultrasound probe on the skin to achieve this stable, high-quality, long-term, continuous imaging of different organ. So now the student is moving even faster. But you still have this stable, high-quality imaging.
Then with this, we achieve for the first time real-time imaging of the lung over 48 hours. What can be the potential impact? This will enable us to have long-term monitoring of COVID symptom of the lung at home. If anyone tests COVID positive, we can send the patient home and-- with such a bioadhesive ultrasound sticker. Then for the majority of the patient, you observe this thin pleural line parallel to A-line. That means no COVID symptom in the lung.
However, for very few patients, if you see this irregular pleural line, condensed A-line, that means lung infection. For those patients, they will receive a warning in their cellphone. They should go to hospital for early treatment of this potential COVID symptom of the lung. So that can be the potential impact.
Another one is blood pressure. We know 1 million adults globally has hypertension. Hypertension is the most important preventable risk factor for premature death. It's highly desirable to continuously monitor your blood pressure. However, we know how cumbersome the blood pressure cuff is.
Now, it turns out that your blood pressure is correlated with the diameter of your carotid artery. With that understanding, now we can adhere such a bioadhesive ultrasound patch on the neck to continuously observe-- image the carotid artery. And then with some AI algorithm, we can section this area of this carotid artery, use that to calculate continuous blood pressure waveform.
So here are some of the results. As a byproduct, we can also turn on the Doppler mode to measure the blood flow rate. You can see we can measure many potential parameters of the blood flow.
This is one result. This is my systolic blood pressure over 48 hours, long-term, continuous monitoring. You can see after some training, I have a spike on the blood pressure. Giving this talk, I'm nervous. There's another spike. Then I should either calm down or take some medication. These are the potential impact of a closed-loop mitigation or management of your blood pressure.
Another potential impact is that long-term, continuous imaging of cardiovascular dynamics. We know cardiovascular disease are number one cause of global death. Apple Watch made a breakthrough. They integrated EKG measurement into Apple Watch. However, EKG can only diagnose around 22% of heart attacks. For the majority of heart disease, you need an imaging modality-- for example, ultrasound imaging. Now we can achieve this long-term, continuous ultrasound imaging of the heart over 48 hours. Once you feel a chest pain or uncomfortable, you can send such images and the videos to clinician on demand for early diagnosis for early mitigation.
Another one is muscle. We can measure long-term, continuous image of the muscle. And you can see students love this because this can tell students how much exercise is sufficient or too much. We do not know this. But an ultrasound image can tell you exactly the optimal moment to stop the exercise. And even after exercise, you can continuous observe the evolution of your muscles, of your blood flow in the muscles. So these are the potential impact on sports medicine, rehabilitation, many other potential areas.
We can also measure the rigidity of organs because many diseases, such as tumor, such as acute liver failure, are correlated with the modulus change of the organ. Here we use acute liver failure as an example. You can see when this-- we use an animal model-- undergo the acute tumor failure, the Young's modulus increase over four times. With this bioadhesive ultrasound, we can quickly capture the onset of the acute liver failure for early treatment, early mitigation of such diseases.
Not only that-- because we do not need a hand to hold the ultrasound probe, we can literally adhere multiple patches to image multiple organs together simultaneously. So for example, this student is walking between Harvard and MIT. We measure the carotid artery, jugular vein, the heart, stomach, bladder, muscle simultaneous. And we observe very interesting correlations between these organs in daily activities. That's the potential impact of this technology.
So it turns out that this wearable technology can be as hot as genetic editing and artificial intelligence. This is the Altmetric score of the bioadhesive ultrasound paper after publication. It's similar to the Altmetric score, societal attention score, of a CRISPR by Doudna and the Charpentier's Labs. It's even similar to AlphaGO paper by DeepMind. So that's the potential societal attention.
We care more about leading clinicians' opinion. For example, Eric Topol commented, "It's a very impressive new frontier about how we can use ultrasound imaging continuously to assess multiple organs, organ system. It's a new window into the human body that we have never had before. This is anatomy. This is very different. We have never had a sensor with continuous anatomical imaging."
With that, then what's the next step? Here is our vision. And we are achieving this vision, I believe, in the next few years. We can develop personalized foundational model of the-- of body based on wearable imaging data and the AI. Now, with multiple ultrasound patches, we can obtain huge amount of imaging data in your daily activity. And that personalized foundational model can enable long-term, continuous health monitoring to monitor whether you deviate from this foundational baseline model. Early diagnosis intervention of diseases-- already discussed some examples. Observation of tumor development, brain development, fetal development, preterm birth, women's health-- I see some questions about women health-- indeed, we can achieve that.
What are the challenges? In terms of challenges, we are addressing these challenges one by one. Hardware-- we need a better miniaturization, low-power electronics, human integration, manufacturing. Software-- we need AI algorithm analyzing larger amount of time series imaging data, diagnosis, prognosis, and the full-body foundation model.
Clinical regulation-- FDA approval, data privacy. Timeline-- our goal is to make ultrasound a wearable commodity for global health in 10 years. And we are working very hard together with the startup company Sonologi to achieve this goal in the next 10 years.
Acknowledgment-- the research collaborator discussed in this talk-- Professor Qifa Zhou and Professor Hsiao Chuan Liu from USC. These are ultrasound elastography experts. Clinical collaborators over the last 10 years-- Professor Christoph Nabzdy from BWH, Aman Patel, MGH, Albert Kwon, Stanford Medicine, Aristidis Veves, BIDMC, Leigh Griffith, Mayo Clinic, Pablo Hawker, MGH.
These are not only collaborator. Eventually, they become co-founders, advisors of startup companies we co-founded. Of course, funding from NSF, NIH, and the Philips-- also, private donors to MIT Zhao lab. If you are interested in our research, if you are impressed by our vision, feel free to donate to our lab.
Then I want to propose another vision, merging humans and machines. The impact is not limited to wearable imaging. We'll have better health, better understanding of biology, and even future of the humans and society. We are achieving this vision not only by publishing papers. We license our technology to companies such as CIRS and converted them into FDA-approved major medical phantom in the US. And many clinicians were trained by our tissue phantom. Eventually, they help many COVID patients during this pandemic.
We are converting our bioadhesive technology through SanaHeal. Not only SanaHeal published papers in Nature. We also win Nature spin-off prize-- only one prize each year. We are converting our magnetic robot, soft robot technology, into Magnendo. And now Magnendo achieving this goal of remotely treat stroke patients. We are converting this or translating this wearable ultrasound technology through Sonologi. Thank you very much.
MIKI KATO: Thank you very much, Xuanhe. It was very great. And before looking at the audience question, I would like to ask a question related-- today's topics.
XUANHE ZHAO: Sure.
MIKI KATO: So to make your continuous imaging and ultrasound to be a wearable commodity widely used by people-- maybe you already explained. But what would be the most challenging things, including regulatory issues?
XUANHE ZHAO: Yes or no. So of course, regulation, data privacy, is one important challenge we are facing. However, because ultrasound is non-invasive, it's already being widely used in clinical applications. And the ultrasound we are talking about here is an imaging modality. So we have confidence we can achieve FDA approval in early stage. Actually, Sonologi is achieving FDA approval this year, hopefully.
So not only that, but because the ultrasound imaging that we are developing is long-term, continuous, and is miniaturized-- so we can achieve this even larger amount of data, enable capabilities that are unavailable in existing ultrasound systems. So that may enable new functionalities, such as monitoring. Traditional ultrasound is only for diagnosis. Now wearable ultrasound-- through Sonologi, we are achieving long-term, continuous monitoring. And these are foundational of human model.
MIKI KATO: Thank you. Next question-- considering this evolving capability for remote continuous monitoring and imaging, what are some of the most compelling use case you envision? Is there potential, for example, to improve health outcome in remote geographies?
XUANHE ZHAO: Very good question again. So the most important-- so there are-- well, the application of this wearable ultrasound technology will be achieved step by step. The first one is in hospital. So we can-- for patients in hospital, now we can enable this long-term, continuous monitoring of deep internal organs. So that's the first step. It's not remote, per se. But it's already enabled this long-term, continuous monitoring.
Then in the second step, indeed, we will deploy this for home-based use, deploy this in developing countries. And for that, we will achieve or receive this remote data. And for the majority of the data analysis-- will be done by AI. Then the clinicians will be in collaboration with AI algorithm for analysis of this remote data and the remote diagnosis. So this is a further vision. But we believe the technology are achieving this tipping point. Eventually, we can achieve this vision.
MIKI KATO: Thank you very much. Questions from audience-- have you tried to continuously monitor pregnant women with this technology?
XUANHE ZHAO: Thank you so much. This is a great question. We have not yet because the IRB approval for pregnant woman is another level. Currently at MIT, we only monitor healthy and certain patients, but not pregnant woman.
However, because the power of bioadhesive ultrasound is so low and it's only imaging modality, we believe there should be no major barrier to apply this to pregnant woman, even-- especially later stage-- these high-risk pregnant woman, for example, to detect preterm birth and to detect or monitor other conditions of those pregnant woman.
MIKI KATO: Thank you. Our next question is related-- ultrasound. Have you compared the detection performance with existing ultrasound system?
XUANHE ZHAO: Yes. So this is a good question. The question is about the performance of our bioadhesive ultrasound with existing ultrasound system. Because our technology is based on a thin, rigid, but high-quality ultrasound probe, through this bioadhesive coupling-- this is really a unique design of the system-- we can achieve the imaging quality of existing point-of-care ultrasound system. Indeed, we compare with many flagship point-of-care ultrasound system. We can achieve similar level of imaging quality.
But our goal is not limited to that. Our goal-- we want to achieve really clinical level. This is a large heart-based imaging quality. And the Sonologi and my lab are working towards that goal.
MIKI KATO: Next question is related-- other locations of the human body. Is this real-time bioimaging ultrasound applicable to monitoring eye cataract ripening and glaucoma effect?
XUANHE ZHAO: This is a very interesting question. My answer is we do not know. But if a conventional ultrasound has been used for such application, then we have confidence because we are based on, again, a thin, rigid, high-quality ultrasound probe. So we can make it a very high frequency to have high-resolution imaging. If conventional ultrasound can achieve that, then we can provide a long-term, continuous monitoring version of such ultrasound.
MIKI KATO: Thank you. Last question-- is it possible to use this for brain?
XUANHE ZHAO: Very good question. The answer is it's possible because in the domain of brain imaging, currently, there are already so-called functional ultrasound, especially to image blood vessels through some acoustic windows of the brain. So we believe we can convert such capability into a long-term, continuous, wearable version. So that's one possibility.
Another possibility-- for babies, for babies, especially in NICU, some of the bone of their brain is not closed yet. Then with those cases, we can easily image the brain for diverse monitoring and diagnosis applications.
MIKI KATO: Thank you very much, Xuanhe. If you are interested in his research, please reach out to your program director. Thank you very much.