by
Olga Deshchenko, DOTmed News Reporter | May 16, 2011
From the May 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
In the works
U-Systems isn’t alone in its work to expand ultrasound’s uses. TechniScan Medical Systems has developed an automated breast imaging system dubbed Svara Warm Bath Ultrasound.
The company’s WBU technology acquires images while a woman lies prone on a table with her breast suspended in a warm water bath that’s close to skin temperature.
“We use two different kinds of ultrasound and they work together from an algorithm standpoint in the image reconstruction to allow us to make a 3-D image,” says David Robinson, TechniScan’s president and CEO.
The first ultrasound is a traditional high-frequency exam, followed by what Robinson calls the company’s “secret sauce,” a transmission exam.
The system transmits a very low frequency plane of ultrasonic energy from one side of the breast, which is received by more than 1,000 little transducers on the other side. The scattered information is captured and used to reconstruct two values -- the speed of sound and the attenuation of sound. “We take that sound speed information and that’s used as an input that allows us to reconstruct the reflection information into a tomogram,” explains Robinson.
The transmission mode enables the scanner to see beyond the collagen-based features that give a breast its shape and form. “We’re imaging the cellular-based structures that live within that collagen-based structure,” says Robinson.
TechniScan is in the process of applying for FDA clearance of the WBU device. So if and when the agency OKs the product, does the company hope to replace mammography as the breast screening modality?
“Hope doesn’t sell on the market,” says Robinson. “You have to be realistic.”
Mammography is a very good tool for screening a large number of women at low cost, he says, and it’s “behaviorally and economically” entrenched in society.
But Robinson sees immense value in the use of ultrasound as a diagnostic adjunct to mammography or as an option for women for whom the gold standard technology just doesn’t cut it.
TechniScan considers its primary competitor to be another imaging modality – breast MRI. Because the WBU device produces very high-resolution images, in a way, it’s more similar to an MRI than mammo, and thus is the market the company plans to take on, says Robinson.
Image courtesy of TechniScan
Two of TechniScan’s systems are currently gathering clinical data at the UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Based on preliminary data, the company plans to submit about 250 case studies and data from eight readers in a blind interpretation as part of the FDA approval process.
