Are Telehealth Ultrasounds Possible?

A new study is attempting to determine whether a doctor can perform long-distance, tele-robotic ultrasound exams over the Internet .

The study, being conducted by New York’s Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center, features Tele-Robotic Ultrasound for Distance Imaging (TRUDI) technology developed by Jeffrey Soble, M.D., and Sarah Doherty, co-founders of TeleHealthRobotics.

“Our platform brings together remotely controllable robotics, ultrasound and telepresence to allow an experienced operator located anywhere in the world to perform an ultrasound exam at a distance,” Soble, an associate professor of Cardiology at Rush University Medical Center and part of the current study, said in a news release.

In the study, a cardiovascular specialist at Mount Sinai, using a personal computer with a standard Internet connection, manipulates a small, robotic arm outfitted with TRUDI to conduct a four-minute scan of the carotid artery in patients at Rush. Some 100 patients, age 60 and older, were recruited for the study, which seeks to determine if tele-robotic ultrasounds are just as effective as in-person manual ultrasounds in testing for signs of carotid intima-media thickness and carotid atherosclerotic plaque, which are risk factors for cardiovascular events like heart attack and stroke.

As part of the clinical trial, each patient at Rush also receives a ultrasound on-site so that the two processes can be compared.

“If this tele-health breakthrough proves feasible and successful, it may open the door for more accessible screening, prevention and diagnostic capabilities for patients who may be at high-risk for cardiovascular diseases,” Rami Doukky, M.D., MSc, the study’s principal investigator at Rush, a professor of Medicine and Radiology at Rush Medical College and the Interim Chief of Cardiology at the John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County in Chicago, said in the news release.

“Launching long-distance, tele-robotic ultrasound exams between two major hospitals in two large cities is a sign that we may be able to make waves in accelerating access to and cost-effectiveness of this critical heart health imaging diagnostic tool to other cities, small towns, or rural communities in need,” added Partho P. Sengupta, M.D., the study’s principal investigator at Mount Sinai and director of Interventional Echocardiography and Cardiac Ultrasound Research and associate professor of Medicine (Cardiology) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

It was Sengupta who first tested the technology last year, when he used TRUDI to perform the first robot-assisted trans-Atlantic ultrasound of a person in Boston while he was in Germany. At roughly the same time, Mount Sinai collaborated with physicians in Sweden to use the technology to treat heart failure patients at a remote primary care facility located some distance from the nearest hospital.

“Our successful first-in-man international experiment opened up a new frontier for the use of remote, robotic ultrasound imaging that could potentially be more efficient and cost-effective overall for healthcare delivery,” Sengupta said.

“Tele-robotic imaging may be the key ‘helping hand’ we need to accelerate greater local and global healthcare access,” Valentin Foster, MD, PhD, director of Mount Sinai Heart at Mount Sinai, said in the release.