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Biotech / Medical : IMAT - ultrafast tomography for coronary artery disease -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stock bull who wrote (2910)	2/3/1999 4:03:00 PM
From: Bruce Rozenblit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3725

If that is the perception in the marketplace, then there would be absolutely no reason for any cardiologist to resist the technology either on a medical or financial basis. Would a cardiologist reject a patient referred by a primary care physician? Would a cardiologist refuse business? The only reasonable answer is "no" in both cases. Do they view it as taking fee away from them by allowing less skilled and specialized people the ability to make a diagnosis? Quite possibly yes? Yes? Therefore, I harken back to a previous post of mine where I suggested the machine should be stripped down to reduce cost because: 1. It just costs too much in its current form. 2. Perhaps the best, most cost effective and "market acceptable" application is not in making a final determinative diagnosis but as an initial screening device to find potential problems. 3. If you accept item 2 as the "mission" for the machine from a business point of view, then many things are possible. Such as: A. Reducing the resolution from 3 significant digits to 1.5 thereby dramatically lowering the number of sensors. This thing is a huge real time data acquisition system with over 1700 data points. That's 1701 wires and I bet that's all done by hand. Plus all the input hardware before data is sent to the processor. If the needed information is a number, the machine only has to say any score over 1.5 or 2 (on a scale of say 0 to 5 for instance)means its time to see the cardiologist. No doctor is going to change treatment based on a score change from 135 to 145 over a scale of 0 to 500. But he (or she) will on a score change from 100 to 400. B. Change the geometry of the sensors so they just image an 8 inch cylinder instead of the volume of the entire chest cavity. This would also greatly reduce the number of sensors. Every data point removed saves a lot of money. Perhaps using two tungsten targets would allow use of triangulation techniques to differentiate cardiac calcium from the rest of the body. Right now, it looks like they gather data on the entire chest volume first and then pluck out the needed information. Furthermore, a more efficient geometry might open up the possibility of reducing beam power. Currently beam power is 83 kilowatts and people that's a lot for an X-ray machine. I bet this things has a peak power draw of 150 kilowatts. That adds a lot to the cost of installation. Power consumption drives many costs and reducing it is a major money saver. C. Now this idea is a little far out. Data compression systems work on the principle of redundant information. If a mathematical analysis was done, within the confines of accepting the reduced resolution, it might be possible to determine that some percentage of the data is redundant and can be compensated for with an algorithm. This would allow a further reduction in the number of sensors. Its like data compression in reverse. This would make for a wonderful project for a university to tackle and would encompass several disciplines. I'm on the edge here but its worth considering. The end result is a dedicated single use machine that would be far less expensive to produce and more acceptable to the industry as it would not be a threat to existing procedures.