AIX-EN-PROVENCE, FRANCE, 18 August 2015 – SuperSonic Imagine (Euronext: SSI, FR0010526814), a company specializing in ultrasound medical imaging, today announced the installation of its Aixplorer Ultrasound System at The Agostino Gemelli Teaching Hospital in Rome, Italy. The Agostino Gemelli Teaching Hospital is ranked as the number one Italian oncology hospital for the number of patients treated and the number of non-profit clinical trials and ranked third for non-profit drug experimentations performed. It serves as the teaching hospital for the medical school of the Universita’ Cattolica Del Sacro Cuore, the largest private university in Europe with over 41,000 students across 12 schools. Aixplorer will be used in Internal Medicine & Gastroenterology, primarily for the assessment of chronic liver disease.

The Aixplorer ultrasound imaging system provides real-time data not only on tissue morphology but also on elasticity (stiffness), allowing physicians’ greater accuracy of diagnosis. Its built-in UltraFastTM software platform has the ability to acquire images 200 times faster than conventional ultrasound, enabling Supersonic Imagine’s proprietary ShearWaveTM Elastography (SWE™) technology to quantify tissue stiffness in real time.

ShearWave Elastography is an easy-to-use, non-invasive exam that provides real time, color-coded maps with quantitative measurements of liver stiffness that help assess chronic liver disease. As a general rule, liver stiffness increases with the severity of liver fibrosis, making it an important parameter to help physicians determine disease stage. Liver biopsy has traditionally been considered the gold standard for staging liver fibrosis but this invasive method has major drawbacks, including significant incidence of morbidity, procedure and hospitalization costs, and clinical shortcomings as fibrosis is underestimated in 10-30% of cases1-2.
The accuracy of SWE combined with its procedural convenience has the potential to significantly reduce the number of liver biopsies used for the staging of fibrosis and assessment of cirrhosis. Such a paradigm shift will not only save time and hospital costs but also reduce morbidity and improve patients’ quality of life. This technique may also play a significant role in monitoring antiviral therapies used to address health concerns such as hepatitis C.

The adoption of the Aixplorer by the Agostino Gemelli Teaching Hospital represents a major achievement as it further demonstrates the rapidly growing interest in this innovative technology for the assessment of chronic liver disease. The installation was made possible through the Company’s on-going partnership with United Technologies Italy, one of SuperSonic Imagine’s Italian distributors.

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