DM: What about CT?

JEH: As you reported (www.dotmed.com/news/story/9139), SharpView is our sister company whose core technology is provided by us. In CT our technology has been used to reduce dose. The way it works is basically the same methodology as when we improve the image, because when you lower the radiation dose in a CT scanner, the image degrades in terms of quality. There will therefore be more noise and more defects. What we do is apply image enhancement software to restore the quality to what it was before the dose reduction...allowing lower dose to be used [in the first place].

DM: I understand that you have new ultrasound image software. Tell us how your work informs that modality.

JEH: One big difference with ultrasound is the use of moving images compared to X-ray, MRI and CT which lack movement and the passage of time. From our point of view it makes quite a big difference.

When we started to look at ultrasound and consider how to improve the image quality, the big challenge was to make this happen fast enough because image enhancement requires quite a lot of calculation in terms of applying the algorithm to the images. Since early 2000 we understood that we could do something that would have a very good impact in ultrasound. But then the PC market (Intel) drove the capacity to higher levels, so in 2003 we improved our algorithm to show a solution in real time to achieve immediate improvement while a doctor was applying the process to the patient. We were among the first to show real-time ultrasound image enhancement that was very visible to the doctors with details coming forward in a more accurate manner. Edges, border lines and textures came out in a better way than an unenhanced image. Our customers' customers--the doctors--had a preference for this type of enhancement. Our customers [OEMs] showed a strong preference for the benefit of using our software in their devices. They could basically increase their competitive edge and move upward to a high-end solution because the image came out much better.

DM: What is volumetric image enhancement?

JEH: That is the next step of Ultrasound image enhancement, that we introduced at AIUM [American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine, April 2-5, 2009 in New York]. So far we have been using two dimensional image data in applying image enhancement. We really had looked at just the X and Y planes. Because ultrasound, as well as other modalities, generates volume data and ultrasound is an echo that fills up volume in terms of image data, we saw the potential to use the volume to bring forward more details in the enhancement than we can do with 2D. We took the lead in being the first to introduce image enhancement on a volumetric image. We are very excited about it and see great opportunity to bring more information up to the surface--volumetric data compared to two dimensional data.

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