Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Medical Device Manufacturer Makes Hand-Carried Ultrasound a Reality
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Life Sciences, Medical Devices
Customer Profile
SonoSite, the innovator and world leader in hand-carried ultrasound, offers imaging performance typically found in costly machines weighing more than 300 pounds in a system approximately the size of a laptop.
Business Situation
For its newest hand-carried ultrasound device, original equipment manufacturer SonoSite wanted an embedded operating system with versatile connectivity options and a powerful development environment.
Solution
Working with Texas Instruments, a Windows Embedded Partner and integrated systems provider, SonoSite developed Windows Embedded CE system software in half the time and at a lower cost than was typical in the past.
Benefits
Reduced development time from 24 to 12 months
Cut per-seat developer costs by 85 percent
Peripheral and integrated device support
Core architecture road map supports future products / “Compared with our previous development process and embedded operating system, we literally cut development time in half.”
Nick D’Ambrosia, Software Manager – Platform and Operating System, Sonosite
SonoSite, Inc. (Nasdaq:SONO) is leading in the race to make medical imaging devices smaller and more portable. Its lightweight, hand-carried, point-of-care ultrasound products enable clinicians to deliver safer, better, faster care, right at the patient bedside. For its latest product, SonoSite M-Turbo™ system, the company wanted to maintain rapid boot-up time of less than 15 seconds, while increasing system performance and enabling high-bandwidth transfer of image data files for clinicians to be able to seamlessly access digital images for diagnostic consultation, instruction, and publishing. SonoSite sought an embedded operating system to run with Texas Instruments’ DaVinci Technology. As a Windows® Embedded Partner, Texas Instruments recommended Microsoft® Windows® Embedded CE 6.0 for its support of connectivity options, multimedia capabilities, and integration with Visual Studio®2005 development tools. Compared to previous projects, SonoSite estimates that development time was cut in half to 12 months from 24 months and per seat developer costs were reduced by 85 percent.
Situation
SonoSite has taken what seemed impossible a few years ago—point of care imaging—and turned it into a reality. Clinicians use SonoSite’s ultrasound systems for both diagnosis and procedure guidance in a wide range of clinical applications and settings, both inside and outside of the hospital.
In planning the development of its newest product, the M-Turbo system, SonoSite wanted to achieve a new level of performance and differentiation from its competitors. The company also sought to leverage its strong internal development experience as the innovators of hand-carried ultrasound devices with external resources that could seamlessly integrate state-of-the art connectivity and multimedia tools.
According to Nick D’Ambrosia, Software Manager – Platform and Operating System, SonoSite, “We needed to create a platform that could easily integrate into medical and hospital information infrastructures. This meant the device had to be able to connect to existing hospital and clinical networks over a LAN connection, preferably wireless.”
The product also needed embedded USB 2.0 peripheral and host connectivity to support high-speed transfer of multimedia data to peripheral storage devices, which then would interchange video data between M-Turbo systems and standard computer workstations and portable media players.
In terms of performance, SonoSite’s requirements pushed the outer limits of what had been previously possible for portable ultrasound systems. “Most portable ultrasound machines take at least a minute or two to start up,” says D’Ambrosia. “Our customers wanted a device that they could rely on to be operational within 15 seconds of cold booting. Clinicians also expected the same or better user experience and performance than they would get from a typical consumer electronics device.”
Another major requirement was the ability to use state-of-the-art tools that could be integrated into the SonoSite development process. “We have a large number of in-house software developers, so productivity is really critical,” remarks D’Ambrosia. “We wanted an integrated development environment that wouldn’t cost a small fortune to maintain. The company was also concerned with selecting an operating system that would support the requirements of our long-term product development roadmap. This meant going with a vendor with a strong commitment to continuous innovation and development of the OS and its associated tools.”
Solution
After getting a strong endorsement from its silicon vendor, Texas Instruments (TI), SonoSite decided to move forward with Microsoft Windows Embedded CE as the operating system for a hardware platform built around the TMS320DM644x™ DSP-based System on Chip (SoC) for DaVinci technology. The DSP-based SoC includes an integrated 600-MHz C64x+DSP core and a 300-MHz ARM926 core.
“SonoSite has shown true leadership in the emerging field of mobile imaging by using DaVinci technology and Windows Embedded technology as building blocks to create a highly differentiated digital imaging device.,” says Greg Mar, DaVinci Technology Manager, Texas Instruments. “With DaVinci technology, SonoSite was able to leverage an integrated processor with codecs as well as development tools like evaluation modules and robust board support packages—all optimized to work together to shorten time to market and allow customers like SonoSite to spend more resources on differentiation.”
“The combination of TI’s DaVinci technology for the video processing system and Windows Embedded CE for the operating system was instrumental to the ultimate success of our solution,” says D’Ambrosia. “The M-Turbo system boots up in just 14 seconds, thanks in large part to the very small footprint we achieved with the componentized Windows Embedded CE system. We used only the modules we needed and got the OS footprint down to just a few megabytes so it loads very quickly.”
Windows Embedded CE also gave SonoSite developers the flexibility to initialize and configure only critical peripherals on boot up, saving even more critical time. “Imagine yourself in an urgent medical situation, like a trauma patient in an emergency room, would you want your healthcare provider to have an ultrasound machine that takes two minutes or more to boot up, or a unit that boots up in seconds?” asks D’Ambrosia.
Leading edge multimedia features were enabled by Windows Embedded CE, which includes DirectX®—the core Windows technology that drives high-speed multimedia. The SonoSite device handles a broad range of industry standard formats, including H.264, AVI, and JPEG, for streaming image data to an external peripheral device and playback on the hand-carried device. Windows Media® Player allows for immediate playback of these saved images on a standard PC, Mac, or workstation. Digital archival, review, and communication of medical images in standard media formats is rapidly expanding. Windows provides an extremely flexible media architecture to meet the requirements of this environment.
SonoSite’s internal development team handled all Windows Embedded CE software engineering, including porting the kernel and developing the OEM Adaptation Layer (OAL), boot loaders, USB and Ethernet drivers, and all core functionality. Most of SonoSite’s software developers were already familiar with Windows development tools, such as Visual Studio 2005, which made it easier to get up to speed quickly.
“The team really enjoyed working with the tools found in Platform Builder for Windows Embedded CE,” says Tom Scherger, Software Engineer, Platform and Operating System, SonoSite. “After just a short amount of training, we were able to get the tools up and going, which was critical for debugging our target device. Our hardware debugging tool, the Lauterbach In-Circuit Emulator, was supported by Microsoft with a hook in Platform Builder, which gave us much better visibility into the inter-processor bus communication between our product-specific ASIC’s, FPGA, and the SoC.”
Scherger continued, “We found the kernel profiler tools to be very effective at identifying performance bottlenecks, especially related to our custom drivers. The profiler helped us benchmark performance by measuring the slice of time spent in each function. This allowed us to make adjustments that helped reduce boot time.”
The integration of Visual Studio 2005 with Platform Builder for CE 6.0 delivered further productivity gains for SonoSite developers by enabling parallel software and hardware development paths. By providing an emulation environment of the hardware, the development tools allowed parallel development of the hardware, platform board support package, application, and ultrasound integration into the final solution.
“We built a Smart Device Emulator for our development platform and interfaced it to a custom Win32 Application simulator that resembled our final hardware configuration running on a workstation,” Scherger explains. “This allowed application developers to port their code to an environment that resembled the hardware prior to actual hardware deployment.”
He continues, “We also found the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework to be a great tool for quick development on standard reference platforms for prototyping.”
To gather clinical feedback, SonoSite pre-released its hand-carried M-Turbo system to select beta sites, including to Stuart A. Grant, MD, Director of Medical Student Education and Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at Duke University Medical School in Durham, North Carolina. “It is remarkable that SonoSite was able to listen to our needs and respond with a product that addressed them in a matter of months,” says Dr. Grant who estimates his department performs some 3,000 regional anesthesia procedures a year on adult and pediatric patients. “The enhanced image quality and the ease of use of the M-Turbo is outstanding and will make it easier for clinicians to successfully perform regional nerve blocks. Additionally, the ability to download images onto a USB thumb drive makes it simple to acquire and archive images for use in teaching and for patient records. It’s a great system. SonoSite really listened to what we needed.”
Benefits
Windows Embedded CE delivered several important benefits to SonoSite. Technical benefits included the familiar development tools; peripheral and integrated device support; and core architecture for future products. Business benefits included faster time to market; lower development cost; and the ability to tap into a rich development ecosystem and large community of developers.
Faster time to market and Lower Development Costs
SonoSite made remarkable gains in time-to-market when it adopted the Windows Embedded CE operating systems. Part of the gain came from the speed with which SonoSite was able to hire qualified Windows programming resources
“Compared with our previous development process and embedded operating system, we literally cut development time in half,” claims D’Ambrosia. “New product development used to take about 24 months, from design to delivery, whereas the Windows-based M-Turbo development took just 12 months. A lot of that gain was due to the tools. The Windows tools were hands-down better than what we had been using previously.”
The Windows Embedded CE development tools also helped SonoSite lower development costs compared with other development tools in use at SonoSite. SonoSite reports that with other operating systems, each developer seat cost thousands of dollars to purchase, plus thousands of dollars in annual maintenance fees. Windows Embedded CE tools cost less than a thousand dollars per developer seat and the free OS maintenance updates are downloadable via the web.
“Across a team of several dozens developers, the company estimates a savings of $150,000 in purchase costs, and roughly $80,000 per year in maintenance,” calculates D’Ambrosia.
Peripheral and Integrated Device Support for Versatility
Integrated support for devices is a hallmark of Windows Embedded CE. For example, the operating system incorporates the Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) library, which specifies a standard interface between kernel-mode network drivers and the operating system.
“Inclusion of components like the NDIS helped lower costs and provided more granular control over drivers to reduce power requirements,” says Scherger.
Windows Embedded CE provides M-Turbo with USB 2.0 host functionality that enables primary connectivity with peripherals that include HID and other mass storage devices, thermal printers, and wireless 802.11g adaptors.
“Our clinical customers are enjoying a huge jump in patient information throughput because this device can support USB 2.0,” Scherger comments. “The new M-Turbo model moves data six times faster than our previous generation products.”
Fast Porting with Shared Source Software
When SonoSite begin the M-Turbo development project, it received a set of reference tools from TI that had been released under Windows CE 5.0. Windows Embedded CE 6.0 met SonoSite’s requirements for performance and reliability so the developers ported the package in less than two weeks.
The only issue was the display driver. The SonoSite engineers needed examples of code that would illustrate the differences between the releases. By participating in Microsoft Windows Embedded CE Shared Source Program, SonoSite was able to examine source code, understand the differences, and see what was expected by the default driver, Ddi.dll.
“The ability to view source code was a powerful benefit of Windows Embedded CE,” says D’Ambrosia. “We plan to use the program again as we try to get the best possible performance from our USB driver. By reviewing the source code, we can better adapt the driver to our hardware. As an embedded platform, we are reliant on source code to understand functionality so that we can adapt it to our platform and performance requirements.”
Meeting Requirements - Today and Tomorrow
Windows Embedded CE provides the assurance of a 10-year Product Support Lifecycle and lifetime IP indemnification for device manufacturers. This was a critical for SonoSite with its products’ excellent reputation for reliability and durability which they back with an industry-leading 5-year warranty.
Windows Embedded CE also supports SonoSite’s future product development roadmap.
“Overall, this new Windows Embedded-based product provides a core architecture that will enable us to quickly respond to market requirements,” concludes D’Ambrosia.
Windows Embedded
The Windows Embedded family of products helps you turn your vision and ingenuity into superior business results. Windows Embedded consists of Windows Embedded CE, Windows XP Embedded and Windows Embedded for Point of Service. These operating system technologies combine with the best set of tools and support to provide you the control to build what you want, accelerated time to market, and industry-leading support.
For more information about Windows Embedded, please visit: