Video-Streaming Biomedical Implants using Ultrasonic Waves for Communication

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the feasibility of using ultrasonic waves for high-quality, real-time video transmission from biomedical implants, overcoming RF limitations, through ex vivo and in vivo biological tissues.

Contribution

It introduces a novel ultrasonic communication system for biomedical video streaming, achieving high-resolution video broadcast in biological tissues, which is a significant advancement over RF-based methods.

Findings

High-resolution video transmission through porcine intestine

Near real-time video broadcast in vivo rabbit abdomen

Ultrasonic communication overcomes RF limitations in tissues

Abstract

The use of wireless implanted medical devices (IMDs) is growing because they facilitate continuous monitoring of patients during normal activities, simplify medical procedures required for data retrieval and reduce the likelihood of infection associated with trailing wires. However, most of the state-of-the-art IMDs are passive and offline devices. One of the key obstacles to an active and online IMD is the infeasibility of real-time, high-quality video broadcast from the IMD. Such broadcast would help develop innovative devices such as a video-streaming capsule endoscopy (CE) pill with therapeutic intervention capabilities. State-of-the-art IMDs employ radio-frequency electromagnetic waves for information transmission. However, high attenuation of RF-EM waves in tissues and federal restrictions on the transmit power and operable bandwidth lead to fundamental performance constraints for IMDs employing RF links, and prevent achieving high data rates that could accomodate video broadcast. In this work, ultrasonic waves were used for video transmission and broadcast through biological tissues. The proposed proof-of-concept system was tested on a porcine intestine ex vivo and a rabbit in vivo. It was demonstrated that using a millimeter-sized, implanted biocompatible transducer operating at 1.1-1.2 MHz, it was possible to transmit endoscopic video with high resolution (1280 pixels by 720 pixels) through porcine intestine wrapped with bacon, and to broadcast standard definition (640 pixels by 480 pixels) video near real-time through rabbit abdomen in vivo. A media repository that includes experimental demonstrations and media files accompanies this paper. The accompanying media repository can be found at this link: https://bit.ly/3wuc7tk.