Augmented Biomedical Imaging Enabled by Integrated-Circuit-Based Motes

Boosting the amount of diagnostic information and reducing costs in biomedical diagnosis is critical for early-stage disease discovery and chronic disease management. The futuristic idea of augmented biomedical imaging promises to perform biomedical assays in vivo and to register their results on the anatomic map, offering a leap in the results’ diagnostic value. This vision’s implementation, however, requires massive efforts in integrated circuits (IC) design to deliver tiny-scale smart motes with ultra-low power consumption that can perform precise measurements and communicate with external imaging equipment.

This talk will first cover our latest attempts to implement augmented biomedical imaging in the context of medical ultrasound, which leads to the prototype named augmented ultrasonography. This prototype serves as a milestone and has directed several research thrusts in ultra-low-power IC design, which will be covered next. The last part of the talk discusses the great yet little-explored synergy between ultra-low-power IC design and biomedical imaging to offer a glimpse of how the ultra-low-power bioelectronics in the future will look like.