A wearable cardiac ultrasound imager

Nature volume  613, pages 667–675 (2023 )Cite this article

Continuous imaging of cardiac functions is highly desirable for the assessment of long-term cardiovascular health, detection of acute cardiac dysfunction and clinical management of critically ill or surgical patients1,2,3,4. However, conventional non-invasive approaches to image the cardiac function cannot provide continuous measurements owing to device bulkiness5,6,7,8,9,10,11, and existing wearable cardiac devices can only capture signals on the skin12,13,14,15,16. Here we report a wearable ultrasonic device for continuous, real-time and direct cardiac function assessment. We introduce innovations in device design and material fabrication that improve the mechanical coupling between the device and human skin, allowing the left ventricle to be examined from different views during motion. We also develop a deep learning model that automatically extracts the left ventricular volume from the continuous image recording, yielding waveforms of key cardiac performance indices such as stroke volume, cardiac output and ejection fraction. This technology enables dynamic wearable monitoring of cardiac performance with substantially improved accuracy in various environments.

The device features piezoelectric transducer arrays, liquid metal composite electrodes and triblock copolymer encapsulation, as shown by the exploded schematics (Fig. 1a, left, Extended Data Fig. 1 and Supplementary Discussion 3). The device is built on styrene–ethylene–butylene–styrene (SEBS). To provide a comprehensive view of the heart, standard clinical practice is to image it in two orthogonal orientations by rotating the ultrasound probe17. To eliminate the need for manual rotation, we designed the device with an orthogonal configuration (Fig. 1a, right and Supplementary Videos 1 and 2). Each transducer element consisted of an anisotropic 1-3 piezoelectric composite and a silver-epoxy-based backing layer18,19. To balance the penetration depth and spatial resolution, we chose a centre resonant frequency of 3 MHz for deep tissue imaging19 (Supplementary Fig. 1). The array pitch was 0.4 mm (that is, 0.78 ultrasonic wavelengths), which enhances lateral resolutions and reduces grating lobes20.

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