[Foomf]

Laptop-sized ultrasound machines have been a thing for at least a decade at this point. It feels insincere to frame ultrasound machines as these big things lugged around on carts still. Hospitals still like those, but there's plenty of pre-hospital ultrasound machines that are compact. Not smartphone compact, but it feels weird for the article to completely omit them.

[Cthulhu_]

The other thing to consider is that these machines cost money and have a write-off lifetime, I wouldn't be surprised if they're designed and purchased for a lifetime of 10, 15 years, with only some consumables like new probes and cables every once in a while.

[hgomersall]

The article is a bit of a puff piece for Butterfly and Exo. MEMS address a problem, but not necessarily the hard one for portable ultrasound. There are plenty of handheld plain old PZT transducer based devices out there.

[xattt]

GE had a handheld model that they featured in some feel-good “we are GE” ad in the late 2000s/2010s.

[nyrikki]

I was at Sonosite in the mid 2000s, that was that entire company. Custom analog ASIC based, but portable tablets.

[Foomf]

Me too! That's the only reason I know laptop-sized portable ultrasound machines exist. I had an internship there one summer where I wrote automation software for the M-Turbo.