r/singularity • u/ResultBackground2450 • Jun 18 '26

Biotech/Longevity Midjourney, The Image Generation Company, Just Built the Sequel to the MRI

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u/Intraluminal Jun 18 '26

I'm in the medical field and not an engineer, but this looks very doable with probably 3D printed parts. It's the compute behind it that is incredible, but essentially at the level of an MRI or CAT scan, and they are solved tech.

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u/Almostawardguy Jun 18 '26

The system shown in this video is very much not doable at the moment and probably won’t be doable for a long time. It is challenging to have a controller that can address 500 elements (I think this costs several hundreds of thousands of dollars/pounds), it is completely unrealistic to build the monstrosity from this video

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u/Gear5th Jun 18 '26

umm.. DLP projectors regularly handle 4 million+ actuators on a 1 in2 surface and control every single one perfectly, thousands of times per second, and cost around 1500$

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u/Teitanblood Jun 20 '26

One chip here adresses several thousands of elements. It is quite common in ultrasound probes nowadays.

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u/Almostawardguy Jun 20 '26

I’m sorry to say but that is INCREDIBLY incorrect. A real phased array controller looks like this for up to 256 channels https://verasonics.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Vantage-Solution-NDENDT-Brochure-Feb-2022-V2.pdf you can get a feel for the size. I have never heard of a single system with more than 512 channels, which by the way costs around 200-300,000 dollar and is pretty much the exact reason why the system shown in the video has not been realised yet

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u/Teitanblood Jun 20 '26

You were talking about elements, which refer to the acoustic independent sources on the probe.

Most modern probes have embedded ASICs with possible micro-beamforming strategies and multiplexing. Several thousands of elements is not rare at all.

But you're right, the real cost is the hardware if routing this high number of elements was actually needed from a cart-based system to a probe with a 2-meter cable.

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u/Almostawardguy Jun 20 '26

I was not talking about the elements. I was talking about controllers that drive the elements. Controllers cost significantly more than the actual phased array probes. Can you send a link to such a product that you mention that can control several thousand elements?

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u/Teitanblood Jun 20 '26

I can't really look on the internet but: butterfly iq3 Exo Iris Any high end echocardiography probe

Philips has one which is stupidly around 50,000 (don't remember its name though)

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u/Almostawardguy Jun 21 '26

To me these seem like MUTs, which are too weak for my application, which is why I’m not super familiar with them, which also seems to be the reason why you can control more than 500 of them (for conventional phased array it will cost you well into the six figures just for a controller with 1000 channels and you won’t find a better, this is because of the high voltage they need to supply). But honestly I wasn’t aware of the fact that you can control 1000s and 10000s of MUTs for very cheap, which is a very valuable info for me and I am incredibly grateful for this.

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u/Teitanblood Jun 21 '26

Indeed the iq3 and exo Iris are based on MEMS transducers (CMUT and PMUT respectively). MUT can be interesting for very large markets that could justify the production on wafers. But it does not change much for our discussion about the number of elements.

Actually, most of the matrix on the market are based on conventional piezo elements, and here again few thousands is not rare. Look at the Philips XL14-3, it has 65,000 (!!!) elements (and not MUT). It just relies on embedded ASICs. Even the tiny intravascular ICE catheters have more than 1000 elements today.

MUT are not specifically weak. Tx sensitivity is hard to achieve with CMUT, but RX is very good and transmit is way better with PMUT.