I really like my Butterfly IQ+ so far. Have used it for probably 100+ ultrasound guided IVs/Art lines and it's great for difficult access situations. Used it a few times for other things like bedside TTE or lung exam to check for pneumo. Even used the bladder scan feature the other day to determine if it would be useful to straight cath a patient at the end of a case - took all of 30 seconds to set up and get a quick scan.
The basis of the tech in the Butterfly, Capacitive Micromachined Ultrasound Transducers (CMUTs), is pretty interesting and comes from research done at Stanford:
Research | Khuri-Yakub Group
The use of CMUTs distinguishes the butterfly unit from most portable ultrasounds on the market today, which use traditional piezoelectric crystals. The CMUTs are the reason why the Butterfly is capable of operating as a linear, phased array, or curvilinear probe...without having to buy additional probes. It also allows them to add some pretty cool features via software, like the recently introduced Bi-Plane mode (think X-Plane), which lets you see both short and long axis at the same time. Granted, I haven't actually used that feature yet, but the pictures on their website look pretty cool.
Now, the tradeoff of using CMUTs is that image quality is not quite as good as piezoelectric crystals. It's still serviceable, but most people would say that the Philips Lumify offers better image quality. However, I find that to be an acceptable compromise given the significant price and versatility advantage of the Butterfly.
Overall: highly recommend.
Some sample images below:
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