Wow Eric.  That's super cool!

  Pocket echo is something I've often dreamed of as part of every single routine office visit  Just like a BP, heart rate, 02 sat, weight ,  now there's  an opportunity for a fresh look at LV function/MR/AI--------no more suprises!  I thought it would come first as the same size as a portable echo (about 15cm screen), it's much smaller than I thought.

Congratulations!  Good luck with getting that reimbursed though!!!

Melissa

Melissa,

No interest in reimbursement!!! This can get rid of countless of unnecessary echoes and make physicans so much sharper at the bedside or inthe clinic during real time visits. And get ready for patients sending their echo to you on your smartphone!

Proctor Harvey probably did not foresee this development. Fortunately, he died before seeing his talent and teachings become extinct.

A real revolution in medical practise

hoping its readily available soon

Why would you exclude reimbursement?

Excellent tool also for the cathlab: Exclusion of an effusion etc.

Great tool!  I would propose that physicians become adequately reiubursed for cognative services and the echo become an extension of the physical exam on a regular bases without routien formal reports or reimbursment. I don't put in an extra charge everytime I place my stethoscope on someone's chest, this would do the same but much better.

An amazing innovation. The image quality looks extremely good. Seems to be an excellent bedside tool.When shall it be available in India ?Thank you for sharing the information.

 

  A great tool,however what about the obese patient whose thick chest wall limits

accurate cardiac evaluation by echo

 

 

great innovation;

now training gets even more important as ever to interprete the images and to describe what is actually really NORMAL because the impact of a false negative echo done with this cellphone-quality and limitations can have huge implications  

The WSJ has an article about the Vscan and pocket echo devices. In answer to questions about when this will be available, it appears that sales will start next week:

http://bit.ly/cuur9C

Great device!!

Unfortunately in Latin-America this kind of  articles are very expensive...

Hi! I am Veronica Botet, from GE Healthcare. You can find all the latest information about Vscan here http://newsroom.gehealthcare.com/press-kits/vscan/

Hope you find it interesting!

Just a quick comment about the reimbursement issue.  I'm sorry it took me so long to get back on this.  I absolutely do not want my comments to misinterpreted in anyway as a negative.  This is a fabulous advance in technology and something I've hoped for for so many years.  I've always thought an echo should be performed as easily as an ECG, especially if there is any change in condition that would warrant it.  How often have we wished we could "get another echo" on a patient whose legs are larger or having more shortness of breath.  I've done a million of them "on the sly" when we knew there would be no reimbursement, i.e. the patient could get an out of pocket bill from the hospital, so we've done "quick look" freebies.    HOWEVER, for private practice cardiologists who have built an entire infrastructure of ancillary personnel on the backs of echo reimbursement  whose techs provide a wonderful service and who feed their families because of the reimbursement it garners, the issue of reimbursement should be considered as an important part of this technology. Less income from echo's spells fewer nurse practitioners in private practices whose owners are not salaried.  So, fewer reimbursed echo's spells fewer RNP's, RN's and techs in our practices which mean that the 8 week wait to get in to see us stretches to even longer. 

Our practices are now nothing more than a fragile house of cards whose livelihood depends upon uncertain reimbursement patterns. It's the dirty part of private practice cardiology but a very necessary issue that can be significantly impacted by advances in every area.  

Melissa

Fully understand your perspective, Melissa. The hope is that this device and others like it in the future will make us better physicans at the bedside and in the out-patient office....not only more rapid and accurate detection/dx, but also to preempt the enormous number of unnecessary echoes. And of course the applications far transcend carddiology for the developing world, and multiple non-cardiac uses. It is an unusual technology that is so potentially disruptive as your comment reflects. It is even potentially disruptive to the manufacturer who certainly would prefer to sell traditional expensive "full service" echo machines!

I remeber a decade ago when we were all waiting for the laptop/portable ultrasound cart revolution. All of the "full-service" carts would be obsolete and "portable" would be the standard. Just as that predicted evolution never moved forward, I see this technology suffering a similar fate. Echo is far more than LV function and requires more than opposable thumbs to create quality images.

What is the price of the V scan?

it is about time to ditch the good old steathoscope .... it has been there for 250 years... just kidding

It's so nice to hear about the efficacy of a medical device in the lay press without the opportunity to review any medical data. Since you have apparently tested the device, what was your sample size and likelihood ratios both positive and negative obtained in your study? What were your inclusion and exclusion criteria? What training did physicians receive? What is the degree of operator success and interoperator reproducibility? It is also a nice, refreshing fact that you have no financial interests in GE vScan. Replacing the stethoscope is a great idea as most doctors use them for show anyway. I wonder about the cost effectiveness of vScan compared to auscultation as I'm sure reimbursement will be demanded and utilization will skyrocket.

This is an amazing technology and I would love to have one to try. Its potential is very exciting. That said........Ultrasound is perhaps the most difficult of all imaging modalities. To suggest that physicians can learn to use this device optimally with a month or even 6 months of training is ludicrous. Even those highly skilled at interpretation would be unlikley to adequately obtain acceptable images.  Studies show that nearly 15% of US exams are performed because of unreliable results from previous exams. While Medicare requires that all individuals performing an US exam is credentialled or the exam is performed in an accredited laboratory, unfortunately there is no enforcement.  False positives would result in additional, unnecessary testing, increasing costs and potentially subjecting patients to invasive procedures. Patients with false negatives wold be perhaps the most unfortunate.    

Get ready for more computer driven devices, another one to look at is the Multifuncition CardioGram (MCG), its an excellent new tool for early detecion of CAD

I would add the notion of patients scanning themselves and having a physician diagnose based upon those images is moronic. I hope there are no physicians out there willing to do so. Fortunately this device being an Medical Ultrasound device, by FDA regulation is only to be bought and used by Physicians and/or medical facilites. Hopefully this regulation will prevail, and the FDA will be granted the Teeth to be able to enforce it. The more products like this that are introduced, being so
small and (relatively) inexpensive the more you will see lay-person’s (like Tom
Cruise) try to be their own Doctor. They will be sadly mistaken once they try
and find they don’t know up from down. Now the next thing we need is
licensing which would require competency bar exams (ARDMS, CCI) in order to
practice. There are too many Psuedo-Sonographers out there already, we
don’t need every Joe Schmoe doing medical ultrasound too.  The regulations Medicare currently has in place, only in select states BTW, have no real method of enforcement and only affect reimbursement, it is not a LAW that states in order to do Ultrasound you must be Registered, just in order to be reimbursed by medicare in certain states you must be, however, only 1 state that I know of audits this.  This "practice" would just increase our already overburdened workload with unnecassary testing because “hey Doc I got this new toy and I saw this thingy and it really looks bad”. Firthermore, half of the Doctors that refer to us already don’t really know what they are looking for, we don’t need more nightmares.  I do thinnk this could be a good tool however, in the right HANDS, of a trained Sonographer, if that "operator" is also a Doctor, that would be welcomed.

Trust me, I am all for more portable, more ergonomically structured diagnostic devices.  However, if one imagines echo ever being as easy to perform as an ECG, one is grossly misguided.  In the hands of skilled, credentialled and educated cardiac specialty sonographers, this new tool could be more than a toy.  In  inexperienced hands,  this could destroy trust in the echocardiogram as a respected diagnostic exam.  Experienced persons in cardiac ultrasound are fully aware of the subtle findings and doppler hemodynamics that constitute a full echo exam.  Screening for the potential large perficardial effusion vs. the enlarged heart by CXR would be great.  Thinking a patient could actually perform an echo on themselves, as opposed to placing electrodes on themselves for an ECG tracing, is ludicrous.  I would like to see more of this new-sized technology, before I rule-in or rule-out its ability to perform a comprehensive echocardiogram.  Of note, the image being shown to the audience on the new small screen device (taken from Topol's chest, I presume) and the subsequent enlarged image shown for comparison, are not one in the same.  Patient safety and quality of care provided are of utmost importance.  If new devices enhance our ability to provide safe, effective, quality care, then what's not to like?  Thanks "KD," (above commentor), echo is indeed more than effusions and LV funciton.    When an echo becomes something other than a hands-on, human dependent interaction between patient and skilled sonographer, maybe a patient will, in fact, be able to beam his/her own images wirelessly from home.   

 

 

Awesome images by this amazingly small portable echo machine. I feel this is a remarkable technological advancement which will have a big potential.

 VScan & Diastolic Handgrip Exercise Using of an External Pressure Transducer: The 1st Pocket-Portable Stress Test device!..

Congratulations!.. Pocket sized will be soon the greatest challenge in Cardiology. I also believe that V scan will replace sthethoscope. It will help private practitioners with experience in echo to diagnoze Low LVEF, valvular/pericardial disease etc. However, I am somewhat sceptical about those colleagues without sufficient expertize; they could get too many "false positive" results.. Alternatively, V scan does not enable probably a detection of exercise -induced abnormalities, since hitherto only dynamic or pharmacologic stress tests are applied....We have showed in last 2 decades that using an external optimal pressurer transducer one can obtain transthoracically recordings (pressocardiograms) which mirror LV presure chnages in itime, slope and amplitude at rest and during Handgrip exercise. Pressocardiography during HG (Presso Test) can be combined with Doppler echocardiography for detecting characteristic LV diastolic abnormalities in pts with HG-induced ischemia as well as in HF pts with or without LVEF decrease. Thus, a "Combined Echo-Presso Handgrip Stress Test" would enable a pathophysiologically more optimal and correct assessment of LV diastolic behaviour and of PV changes. We have intriduced several combined Echo-Presso diastolic indexes in our published European Patent application (2009). A combined "ECHO-PRESSO probe" can also easily be developed for obtaining easier simultaneous echo- and pressocardiograms. We have also published some data comparing Dopler with pressocardiographic diastolic indexes during HG (Manolas et al., Cl Cardiol 2001). For example, ischemia induces an increasing pressocardiographi A wave and decreasing Doppler A  velocity resulting in a dramatically increased ratio of these 2 variables as expression of latent, HG-inducible diastolic dysfunction (decreasing end-diastolic compliance) etc. Dr Topol: It would be exciting and useful to incorporate pressure transducer-derived recordings in the V scan device for introducing the "1st "Pocket Diastolic Stress Test" device..! It would enable a detection of ischemia and latent HG-inducible Lv diastolic dysfunction... 

excellent innovation; very clear images; as a bedside tool this can be very useful  to assess LV function especially in patients going for surgery.

Very interesting, but i think that few clinicians are able to interpret correctly images obtained. ECHO is not as simple as most non-echocardiographers think. They´ll keep asking specialist opinion. Even good cardiologists sometimes have doubts, and it makes a very importante difference in conducting our patients. Congratulations for the study.

Incredible tool for bedside or outpatient checks of myocardial or valvular function.  Really, the pictures displayed are impressive and tantalizing.

My concern is price for such a portable device.  Somehow, I would have to tether it to my body so that I wouldn't leave it behind.  Losing a $300 cell phone is painful.  Leaving a $10,000 dollar echo machine in a patient's bed would be devastating.

I'd also be concerned about the "ruggedness" of the device.  It hurts when you drop a laptop and the hard drive is damaged...but it is a $300 repair...the repairs to this device would be logarithmically inflated.

Nothing more than a toy, it will not add a thing to the info and waste precious bedside time. Echo machines are becoming more portable and smaller but that does not mean you incorporate echo into you rounds or office visits. And why would a pocket echo be any better than a regular echo in the cath lab.

I was the first to introduce echocardiography at the Detroit Medical Center in 1973-74.

I was also expert in Auscultation and Phonocardiography.

What a difference a few decades makes.

Absolutely, that's the way to go. 

Guessing may be fun, but not the way to treat patients.

Now, here in La Jolla, CA, I am happy to see Dr Topol among us.

 

G.M. Hedayat,MD,FACC

Very exciting-dream come true I want one.-as a cardiologist proficient in both scanning and reading. I certainly fear it's potential widespread use and abuse ( leading to false readings ) among those not trained in echo ( or poorly trained ) 

 the opportunities in the underdeveloped countries are countless with this advance   we provide cv care in east afica and cannot adequately assess pts without a cheap and portable echo tool     . is there a contact at ge that would help our ngo obtain a device   thanks    \

Awesome! what is the approximate cost of this device? It will surely be of great help in community cardiology practice or even as a bedside tool. Great innovation of our times.

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the price please in US $

Is this reimbursable through Medicare if performed with the visit?