Use of smart materials in medical diagnostics

Medical diagnostic capabilities have seen explosive growth over the past decade, as new techniques, such as MRI, have been taken from the laboratory setting into the clinical environment, with considerable benefit to the population at large. In this paper, we address another area of medical diagnostics which, we believe, stands on the verge of explosive growth, driven more by the emerging requirements for cost-effective diagnostic tools, and by the evolving needs of the defense medical community, with spinoff of those into the strongly related emergency care area of the civilian market. One of the factors that will drive this area of medical diagnostics is the development of smart materials and the sensors and sensor systems developed from them. In this paper we discuss some of the developments in the field of smart materials as they apply to development of new, low cost acoustic sensors for patient monitoring and medical imaging.© (1996) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.