HCB News: How did imaging mice apply to humans?
AN: That’s a good questions so here’s a for instance- someone may have a pre-disposition to cancer or a congenital heart disease, they could actually develop animal models that simulated and affect those conditions. So you actually had mice that were prone to heart attack or a particular type of cancer. They would actually develop those models, study them, compare them to just normal wild type mice, and then look at potential other therapeutics or treatments. Researchers were really trying to study at a basic science level what was going on with the disease, or actually looking at subsequent treatments.

HCB News: What other structures does the technology give you an advantage in visualization?

AN: A lot of it was focused on looking at very small vascular structures such as the carotid artery or other peripheral arteries like the radial artery. We’re able to very clearly visualize the thickness of vessel walls and individual layers with the so-called intima media thickness, or IMT, which indicated the state of the cardiovascular health of the patient. It would actually start to thicken and widen as atherosclerosis would set in.

HCB News: What about visualization of superficial structures?
AN: Today clinicians are also using the Vevo MD to look at superficial structures in the hands and wrists. There was work done in a hand transplant surgery, actually looking at regrowth of the blood vessels and the nerves.

HCB News: So we understand that the Vevo MD is being used in pediatric applications, particularly with babies and infants with very small structures, can you tell us about who is using this?
AN: The number of institutions using the Vevo MD is expanding quickly, especially among children’s hospitals. Seattle Children's is using it in a number of ways, most frequently for line placement in vascular access work, in particular placing IVs or other lines into patients and using the Vevo MD as a real-time guide. While standard frequency ultrasound is fine for vascular access in adults, with the younger population everything is much smaller. While it's not quite the extreme of going from the human to the mouse, with babies and infants it’s still considerable particularly with vessels and this poses significant visualization and line placement challenges that the Vevo MD has made much more effective.

In many instances, the child may be sick and have poor circulation to begin with. So now you've got vessels that are somewhat compromised and not full and as easily visualized as they could be. In some of these extreme cases where you're trying to get an IV into this patient because if on the operating table you need to be delivering fluids as there may be a loss of blood, for instance. The actual volume of fluid that you can deliver over the amount of time required therefore becomes very significant.

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