Portable Ultrasound Diagnostic System for Pregnancy Diagnose in Swine

Real time ultrasound B-scan systems have been used for the swine pregnancy monitoring during last years because they improve the pregnancy detection, thus reducing the non-productive sow days and increasing sows per year in a livestock farm. The present work deals with a portable hand-carried ultrasound diagnostic system (B-scan in real-time) applied to pregnancy diagnose in swine. The diagnosis system is formed by a small ultrasound system which operates as a simple peripheral device, connected to a mobile computer (laptop, PDA, etc.) through a USB standard communication interface. Consequently, the system can exploit the possibilities of computers and peripheral standard interfaces, and incorporate the technological advances with low development cost. Moreover, it is a low cost system that can use software applications installed in a laptop as databases, expert systems or image processing software