AN electronic engineer has been inspired by his pregnant wife to develop a low-cost baby scanner which could save hundreds of thousands of lives.

Sonar expert Jeff Neasham, from Newcastle University, used cheap components to make a hand-held scanner which can plug into a laptop and produce pictures of an unborn child on a computer screen.

The device can be manufactured for £30 to £40 – compared to the ultrasound machines used in UK hospitals which cost £20,000 to £100,000.

This means the scanners – devised by Mr Neasham with research associate Dave Graham – could be affordable for developing countries.

Mr Neasham, a 39-year-old father-of-two, was inspired to build the scanner when his wife, Zoe, was expecting their first daughter, who is now seven.

He said: “The idea came from my own experiences looking at the pictures of our unborn child.

“It was my wife’s idea – she suggested we could apply what we knew to make them more affordable and make a low-cost system for lots of people around the world.

“My background is in sonar which is very similar to ultrasound.”

Mr Neasham said he treated the project as an “interesting engineering challenge”.

He added: “We ticked along on a shoe-string budget then we started to get some promising results and so we got funding to build a prototype.

“We are not at the stage where we can completely match the image quality of a really high-end scanner but we are getting closer and closer.”

UN figures show 250,000 women die every year from complications during pregnancy or childbirth.

Experts say many deaths are avoidable if medics had the proper equipment.

Mr Neasham said his images could easily show if a baby was in the breach position, but the definition was not yet high enough to determine the sex.

He added: “We are just trying to get the resolution of the images as good as we can, then we will hand it over to the experts.

“My wife is very excited about it – I keep reminding her it was all her idea.”

Vets and farmers have also expressed interest in low-cost scanning.

The research was funded through an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council knowledge transfer account.