Why Are Ultrasound Machines So Expensive?
&gt; A computer that can run a MHz frequency transducer is easy and cheap these days, e.g. a raspberry pi’s GPIO pins can run that frequency.<p>This is ridiculous. Transmitting needs a good amount of energy for a high number of channels (several dozen, and quite often &gt; 100), and at a high frequency. And if you are driving a 10MHz transducer, you will for ex drive it with a 80MHz numeric signal (at least when using a low number of levels, which you often wants to in order to keep an high efficiency for the relatively high power TX)... Citing a raspberry GPIO pin to do that shows that guy does not know what he is talking about.<p>Reception is also not trivial at all, if you want a decent quality. You also sample at a rate &gt; to the centre frequency.<p>Of course you might be able to construct an amateur toy low-end ultrasound machine, but it would be of no clinical value (and of limited value for a lot of other purposes too). Also without extensive measurements, you should not use your resulting machine on any living thing...