I'm going to be a cardiology fellow at Stanford in July, we use ultrasound often for both bedside informal exams as well as diagnostic echocardiogram. I've used handheld devices like the Lumify and Vscan, as well as the large tractor sized epiq machines. Similar to what is written in the article, my impression is that the actual hardware, specifically the transducer, is quite expensive to manufacture. The software and processing power continues to get cheaper but to have to best quality pictures, require expensive transducers. I've actually been very very impressed by the Lumify and I think it is getting near if not better than the quality of the gigantic epiq machines, primarily by having a very high quality transducer. This is indeed a hot area and knowing people who are actively doing development in the field, there are poeple trying things like having a giant paralleled transducers over the entire chest for continuous 3D images and other interesting ideas that are limited more by hardware than processsing power or imagination.