Tell a nurse, physician, or medical technician about the prospect for pocket-sized ultrasound to "see" through the skin, and he'll tell you about its many possible applications, including finding veins, inserting IVs, and guiding catheters and needles.

All the things that make ultrasound widely used in virtually every branch of medicine-it’s real-time, portable, has excellent soft tissue contrast and uses no radiation-also make it an ideal modality to miniaturize into a task-specific tool for routine use. And it's right around the corner. The Sonic Window, a handheld ultrasonic imaging device for routine tasks like needle insertion, will undergo initial human trials later this year. The device and the novel technology that supports it are the invention of William Walker and John Hossack, Associate Professors of Biomedical Engineering, and their colleague Travis Blalock, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The team isn't alone in wanting to make handheld ultrasound the tool no clinician would be without. But where Bill, John and Travis turn conventional ultrasound on its head, or at least on its side, is in how the Sonic Window captures and displays an image. Instead of scaling down B-mode ultrasound (familiar to new parents) which captures images that are perpendicular to the skin’s surface, the team has developed a new architecture to acquire C-mode images parallel to the skin’s surface. The results are particularly suited to the task of locating blood vessels, says Bill; it’s as if the skin becomes transparent.

Moreover, he explains, even today’s smallest ultrasound devices are two-handed operations, with the transducer "probe" remote from the display monitor. But the Sonic Window will be a single unit, and images will be displayed at the point of acquisition on an integrated LCD screen. Any trade-off in image quality will be largely mitigated by this ultra-intuitive, user-friendly image format-not to mention amply rewarded by the Sonic Window’s small scale (the size of a deck of cards) and low price tag (about $1500).