They Built A Company With Spare Parts

"It's amazing what you can do when you have no money," says Barbara Williams.

What she and her brother, Jim, did was take a Canadian neurologist's prototype of an ultrasound arterial scanning device -- "made from a color TV and a bunch of spare parts the doctor found lying around the hospital" -- engineer it, and get it onto the market in six months.

The device, called Echoflow, converts sound patterns of the major arteries leading to the brain into a colorcoded picture that enables physicians to analyze a patient's risk of stoke.

The Williamses' Diagnostic Electronics Corp., based in Lexington, Mass., is exhibiting some healthy pulses of its own. Sales topped $1 million last year, and orders for the device, which numbered about 30 in 1979, are expected to be more than 300 this year.

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