CEA-LETI Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives

Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (CEA) is a French research-and-technology organization with activities in energy, IT, healthcare, defence and security. The Laboratory for Electronics and Information Technology (Laboratoire d’Electronique et de Technologie de l’Information, LETI) is focused on creating value and innovation through technology transfer to its industrial partners. It employs 1,800 scientists and engineers including 250 PhD students and 200 assignees from partner companies. CEA-LETI owns more than 2,800 patent families.

The Microtechnologies for Biology and Healthcare Division focuses on the development of micro-nanotechnologies for applications in the fields of medical imaging, security, in vitro diagnostic, nanomedicine, medical devices and environment monitoring. These activities cover the design, integration and qualification of systems comprising sensors (radiation, biochemical, neural activity, and motion detection), actuators, analog front end electronics, acquisition system, signal processing algorithms, data management and control software.

CEA-LETI’s mail role will be the integration and development of the new multimodal SOLUS prototype for breast imaging (Work Package 3). This contribution will be in close collaboration with the partners providing the different hardware components (AixPlorer system from SuperSonic Imagine, the new ultrasound/optics probe from Vermon) and with the partners providing acquisition protocol and software for image reconstruction and analysis (POLIMI, UCL). CEA-LETI will functionally integrate all these components.

For more information go to leti.cea.fr

SSI SuperSonic Imagine

SuperSonic Imagine (SSI) is an innovative corporation, founded in 2005 by experts in the ultrasound medical imaging field. SSI develops high-end ultrasound systems, embedding classical and new ultrasound imaging modes, such as the shear wave elastography (SWE) or Ulfrafast Imaging (UFI). SWE provides quantitative elastic maps of soft tissues in real time and UFI increases the imaging frame rate by a factor 100 compared to conventional systems to provide additional diagnostic Doppler information. This technology is available in Aixplorer system.

SSI R&D is skilled in developing medical imaging systems with highly innovative features. SSI has extensive, global expertise in the design, fabrication and sales of medical ultrasound machines embedding novel diagnostic modes such as shear wave elastography and ultrafast imaging capabilities. SSI is a world-leader in imaging ultrasound systems for breast cancer diagnostics. The adjunction of optical imaging to SSI products would represent an improvement of the diagnostic phase for the management of the breast cancer disease.

SSI will be actively involved in designing a novel bimodal optical and ultrasound probe optimized for breast imaging. The two modalities will have to be carefully integrated to ensure optimal performance in image qualities (Work Package 2). SSI will implement ultrasound imaging on its platform so that the ultrasound excitation is fully compatible with the optical acquisition (in term of mechanical design, electronic design and connectivity in collaboration with Vermon, and for the design of the spatio-temporal sequencing of acoustical transmission and receive).

Ultrasound image quality will have to be adequately tuned to provide all the morphological information used as priors to reconstruct the optical image (Work Package 3). Dedicated software for the communication between the ultrasound platform and the co-registration computing platform will have to be developed to satisfy the real time scanning performances and the optical reconstruction algorithm constraints.

Furthermore, SSI will participate in collecting phantom data for the assessment of the performance of DOT reconstructed with US priors (Work Package 4) and to the validation phase in the clinical environment (Work Package 5).

SSI will also lead the exploitation of the results of the project (Work Package 7) by selling a novel generation of medical imaging devices that offers an extended diagnostic value for breast medical diagnostics than regular ultrasound machine. SSI is leader of WP7.

For more information go to supersonicimagine.com

Vermon

Vermon SA incorporated in 1984 and was spun off from the medical research group in ultrasound for space applications of University of Tours (France). Since its beginning, Vermon is continuously maintaining its commitment to research and technological development in the domains of ultrasonic apparatus and medical diagnosis and therapy and devotes yearly more than 20% of its revenue to R&D activities. As the result, the company owns numerous patented technologies relating to transducers and ultrasonic medical devices and is ranked as one of the most important medical ultrasonic device manufacturer around the world.

Vermon’s product range covers multi-channel array transducers, 2D-matrix arrays, IntraCardiac Echography catheters and 4D imaging probes dedicated to real time volume rendering that make Vermon the most important and reliable supply source for ultrasound in Europe.

Transducer technologies are Vermon’s core business and the company also develops proprietary technologies and customized solutions such as piezocomposite wherein flexibility and adaptability are superior to conventional devices or capacitive Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers (cMUTs) using MEMS technologies for performance enhanced devices for therapy and imaging. Innovation is the company’s leitmotiv and Vermon is sustainably supporting collaborative research programmes to develop new technologies and processes in order to maintain its competitiveness at European level.

Vermon has extensive expertise in acoustic simulation, ultrasound probe design and manufacturing and smart system integration.

Within the SOLUS project, Vermon will contribute to develop the optical-ultrasound probe for point-of-care diagnostics of breast cancer and share its know-how in medical device manufacture with the consortium.

For more information go to vermon.com