Cephasonics Ultrasound and the Philips MEMS Foundry announced a relationship to collaborate on expanding the market for Philips CMUT devices and expand support for development of new CMUT ultrasound applications.  Through this relationship, Cephasonics and the Philips MEMS Foundry will jointly develop and implement programs to make it easier for developers to evaluate CMUT technology as well as build new CMUT-based applications with an out-of-the-box development solution.

As part of the collaboration, Cephasonics Ultrasound and Philips MEMS Foundry are bundling a complete CMUT-ready ultrasound development platform based on the Cephasonics ultrasound system and the Philips CMUT devises that can be used to evaluate and build next generation commercial CMUT ultrasound applications more quickly.  This is generally not feasible with traditional ultrasound systems since application developers can face significant challenges integrating all the right system components before they can even begin working on new application concepts. This collaboration between Cephasonics Ultrasound and the Philips MEMS Foundry will reduce the barriers and time frame for developers to begin creating new CMUT applications.
 
According to Paul Bekkers, business development manager for CMUT devices at Philips MEMS Foundry, “CMUT devices represent a significant new market opportunity to develop lower cost and higher performance ultrasound systems and that the new CMUT support from Cephasonics will help provide a complete CMUT ultrasound development platform making it easier for developers to create new CMUT-based solutions.”
 
Randall Whiting, VP at Cephasonics said “We’re very excited about working with the Philips MEMS Foundry on both programs to promote CMUTs as well as integrating Philips CMUT devices with the Cephasonics ultrasound platform.  We believe the relationship between Philips MEMS Foundry and Cephasonics will provide the quickest way to develop and commercialize new CMUT-based ultrasound systems in the market.”

CMUTs – capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers – is a breakthrough ultrasound technology. CMUT transducers are MEMS based structures that can be used to transmit and receive acoustic signals in the ultrasonic range. CMUTs enable breakthrough applications for ultrasound technology in a diverse range of industries such as medical, microscopy, inkjet printing and testing among others. Compared to conventional technology, CMUT ultrasound transducers convey numerous advantages such as large bandwidth, easy fabrication of large arrays, and integration with driver circuitry: CMUT-on-CMOS.

Philips’ CMUT technology enables high volume ultrasound transducer manufacturing and high levels of integration at a lower cost. Their CMUT technology platform shortens design cycles and therefore your time-to-market. The relationship between the Philips MEMS Foundry and Cephasonics will provide the quickest way to develop and commercialize new CMUT-based ultrasound solutions.

Cephasonics’ ultrasound technology provides a wide range of ultrasound engines with high performance and low noise designed for product development, OEM and research applications. Cephasonics’ open architecture and flexible embedded-ultrasound provides unique access to comprehensive scanning data for AI applications. They also provide open development tools that empowers customers to quickly create and commercialize innovative new ultrasound applications.  Cephasonics is creating new approaches to how and where ultrasound can be used based on expanded real-time access to data.

About Philips MEMS Foundry:

The Philips MEMs Foundry, a part of Philips Engineering Solutions, designs, develops, and manufactures custom microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and assembles micro devices. Their 140 experts working at the MEMS Foundry and Micro Devices Facility follow a phase-gated approach to demonstrate the feasibility and give proof of concept, develop the process to the required maturity level and manufacture your devices with the right quality.
Find more information on the Philips CMUT solutions at  https://www.engineeringsolutions.philips.com/cmut

Technical University of Munich developed in conjunction with Zhejiang University and Johns Hopkins University a new vision-based robotic 3D ultrasound system powered by Cephasonics to create accurate 3D scans even if the target limb changes position after the scan begins.

While 2D ultrasound imaging can provide images in real time even if the target moves, 3D ultrasound imaging is much more sensitive to changes in movement. Repositioning limbs, for example, may be necessary to make different parts of a limb available to the ultrasound probe in order to image an entire artery. The angle of the 2D image changes from its original position, making it difficult to stitch the images together into a 3D representation.

Robotic ultrasound systems (RUSS) produce high quality images by precisely controlling the contact force and orientation of the ultrasound probe. Combining robot arms with depth cameras to determine optimal probe position increases the accuracy of the scan. This is still not effective for 3D imaging because this system also cannot account for movement of the scan target.

The new system developed by the researchers, as described in the paper titled “Motion-Aware Robotic 3D Ultrasound” (bit.ly/VSD-MTN3D), combines RUSS with depth cameras to make 3D imaging with ultrasound possible. The system uses a LBR iiwa 14 R820 robot arm from Kuka (Augsburg, Germany; www.kuka.com/en-us), a Cicada LX ultrasound machine from Cephasonics Ultrasound (Santa Clara, CA, USA; www.cephasonics.com), and an Azure Kinect 3D camera from Microsoft (Redmond, WA, USA; www.microsoft.com/en-us).

The process begins by drawing a red line on the patient’s skin to mark the path of the ultrasonic probe during the scan. The Kinect camera images the line, and the software registers the path to calculate a trajectory for the robot arm. Two marker spheres with retroreflective layers are placed on both ends of the drawn red line. The spheres help provide reliable position data for the Kinect camera and aid in extracting region of interest and trajectory data. This helps the system account for limb position adjustment during the scan.

Because the system can assign 3D coordinates to images during the scan, even if the limb moves, the system can compensate for the movement and stitch the images together as if the limb movement never took place. This allows for creating accurate 3D scan data. Testing demonstrated that the system compensates for up to 40° of target rotation.

The researchers proposed that a laser system could project a trajectory onto the surface of a limb and replace the drawn red line. Also, while the system test simulated vascular scans, the system could also perform bone visualization.

Small Business Innovation Research Program Provides Seed Funding for R&D
 
Santa Clara, CA October 25, 2019 – Cephasonics Ultrasound is proud to announce that it has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant for $225,000 to conduct research and development (R&D) toward developing a new computational architecture for AI-enabled Ultrafast Frameforming ultrasound systems (UFFFI).

UFFFI is a highly effective approach to imaging and measuring conditions in the human body.  However, its commercial procedure-specific usage has been impeded by the data and computational requirements for real-time processing.  

This research will address the computational challenges of real-time UFFFI, with the objective of creating a new computational design for an ultrasound engine able to process medical-grade image data at high frequency, enable new machine learning algorithms and support real-time clinical applications of UFFFI that can recognize, quantify and characterize structures in the body in real-time.

 “NSF is proud to support the technology of the future by thinking beyond incremental developments and funding the most creative, impactful ideas across all markets and areas of science and engineering,” said Andrea Belz, Division Director of the Division of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships at NSF. “With the support of our research funds, any deep technology startup or small business can guide basic science into meaningful solutions that address tremendous needs.”

“We believe that by overcoming the computational challenges of UFFFI, this research will help open a new range of ultrasound applications and products that access more precise data, which will provide surgeons and doctors real time information to enhance clinical diagnosis and outcomes’” said Richard Tobias, CEO of Cephasonics.
Once a small business is awarded a Phase I SBIR/STTR grant (up to $225,000), it becomes eligible to apply for a Phase II grant (up to $750,000). Small businesses with Phase II grants are eligible to receive up to $500,000 in additional matching funds with qualifying third-party investment or sales.

NSF accepts Phase I proposals from small businesses year-round. Small businesses with innovative science and technology solutions, and commercial potential are encouraged to apply. All proposals submitted to the NSF SBIR/STTR program, also known as America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF, undergo a rigorous merit-based review process.

To learn more about America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF, visit: https://seedfund.nsf.gov/

About the National Science Foundation's Small Business Programs: America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF awards $200 million annually to startups and small businesses, transforming scientific discovery into products and services with commercial and societal impact. Startups working across almost all areas of science and technology can receive up to $1.5 million in non-dilutive funds to support research and development (R&D), helping de-risk technology for commercial success. America’s Seed Fund is congressionally mandated through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The NSF is an independent federal agency with a budget of about $8.1 billion that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering.

About Cephasonics: Cephasonics is a worldwide supplier of precision real-time ultrasound systems for research, product development and embedded OEM applications.   Cephasonics enables next-generation ultrasound research and development as well as enabling companies to create and commercialize new medical ultrasound imaging solutions. 

The Cephasonics open architecture and flexible embedded-ultrasound platform is compact, scalable to 4096 channels, and provides unique access to comprehensive scanning data for AI applications. They also provide open development tools that empower customers to quickly create and commercialize innovative new procedure-specific ultrasound applications and products that can locate, recognize, quantify and characterize structures in the body providing doctors real-time information during medical procedures.

For more information, please contact:Randy Whiting
(408) 772-2428
rwhiting@cephasonics.com

For more information on Cephasonics:  www.cephasonics.com

We're very excited about the opportunity to work with Lambda Labs related to using their AI workstations combined with the Cephasonics Ultrasound engines.

Lambda Labs is probably the best known producer of high-end AI workstations in the market.  We're working with them to help them move into the healthcare market and at the same time be able to provide our customers a wide range of proven high-performance servers specially built for AI applications.  Their performance and use of Nvidia GPUs make the Lambda Labs workstations a perfect server choice for a variety of ultrasound applications built on the Cephasonics platform.

These new Cephasonics elastography systems provide the ability to execute a variety of ultrasound modalities such as beam forming, ultrafast imaging and shear wave elastography. The system uses a single ultrasound transducer to both generate acoustic radiation force in tissue and image the tissue displacement response.  The systems include Push Burst that can generate 4 pulses per second or up to 50,000 cycles per second with a single pulse, support for 100 volts peak to peak and the ability to track and collect up to 32KHz PRF with interleaved mode and up to 10KHz PRF for non-interleaved mode.  The systems also provide direct access to raw data for precision measurements, generating motion data as well as for use in AI applications.

Cephasonics also offers a unique dual-system configuration which enables simultaneous push/imaging with 2 probes. This configuration features a probe connected to a Cephasonics push system that is paired with a second Cephasonics imaging system with the second probe.

We recently entered into relationship with BBS Medical AB from Sweden to develop and market specialized ultrasound probe/transducer adapters that allow users of Cephasonics systems to connect a variety of different probes from other companies to the Cephasonics system.  As part of the relationship, BBS Medical will develop and market the adapters both directly as well as through Cephasonics. 
 
These new adapters will support probes initially from Ultrasonix and overtime a growing number of other probes from other major ultrasound companies to be directly connected to the Cephasonics system without any rewiring or modifications.  This will give our users and developers a much greater array of ultrasound probes that can be used in research and development with the Cephasonics ultrasound engine.  We’re very excited to work with BBS Medical and the ProbeHunter team to expand the ability of our platform to work with popular ultrasound probes.”
 
About BBS Medical AB
 
BBS Medical AB specializes in developing real-time test systems to verify the performance of ultrasound probes, Their ProbeHunter probe testing system currently offers approximately 50 different adapters to test all leading brands of ultrasound probes including GE, Philips, Siemens, Samsung, and Toshiba/Canon.  The BBS Medical ProbeHunter team supports various University ultrasound research programs to enable researchers to quickly and easily verify the performance of their ultrasound probes continuously for their studies. To be verified as an approved supplier for adapters to Cephasonics ultrasound research platform confirms that their work meets the high standards within the ultrasound research industry as ultrasonic experts.