We have been fortunate enough to use the Butterfly in our hospital. While we do have access to echocardiogram machines, they are big and bulky. The Butterfly has allowed us to perform point of care ultrasound at the patient’s bedside with ease. We have used it to look at patients’ ejection fractions whilst on ward rounds, allowing rapid diagnostics decisions to be made. We have also used it for real-time ultrasound guided taps and inter-costal drain placements for loculated effusions. All in all, it has been very useful to have access to the portable Butterfly ultrasound system as both an extension of our examination of patients as well as guiding our procedures.

Our team in Nelspruit has used the Butterfly iQ+™ since August 2023 and we do around 500 POCUS scans with it per month. We use it for a range of POCUS guided procedures, as well as diagnostic POCUS, in both the Emergency Centre and Critical Care units and its portability allows us to easily travel with it between hospitals. It is especially useful to be able to generate worksheet reports on the App in real time and upload these along with still images and videos onto the cloud. The Butterfly iQ+™ POCUS device has completely replaced traditional ultrasound machines in our unit.

I love how I can scan any part of the body without having to worry about switching probes – this means I can do a cardiac ultrasound and scan for a DVT in the same patient very efficiently. I find that the battery lasts a long time, the image quality is sufficient for me to get the information I need and the build quality is of an incredibly high standard. I find that it works well with a cell phone and the interface makes it easy to change presets, gain and depth intuitively. I worked in a district hospital here in Gqeberha for some time where we did not have access to ultrasound. During ward rounds I was able to scan using my Butterfly iQ+™ which avoided needing to refer patients for formal ultrasounds.

The chip-based technology is a game-changer. There are many handheld probes available but having one probe that can do the job of three probes is amazing. My favourite party-trick is the bi-plane view for vascular access. It’s the first thing I show someone when I want to brag about how versatile the Butterfly iQ+™ is. I also love the fact that if I accidentally drop it (which I have, many times!) you don’t knock out a Piezoelectric crystal and have to replace an expensive probe. Its durability is a real selling point. have tried other handheld probes that are wireless and broadcast their own wifi networks for your phone to connect to, and while the lack of wires is nice, the quality of the image and stability of the wifi connection is unreliable. With Butterfly’s wired connection the quality is always excellent and reliable.