BY NORM TOLLINSKY
A Thunder Bay company, XLV Diagnostics Inc., has received funding to commercialize the next generation of digital medical imaging technology.
The new imaging devices will use X-ray Light Valve technology developed by Dr. John Rowlands, founding scientific director of the Thunder Bay Regional Research Institute (TBRRI).
XLV Diagnostics will build a full-scale prototype of the detector in Thunder Bay, mount it on a clinical mammographic stand and test it on imaging phantoms. The XLV technology is much less expensive than active matrix flat panel imagers currently used for digital imaging and would make digital mammography much more affordable for mobile screening vans, small hospitals and rural clinics, improving access to screening and diagnosis of breast cancer in Canada and around the world.
Rowlands, a PhD in physics and a former senior scientist at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, has spent decades working on the development of digital radiography.
“My work has been related to using an interesting material called amorphous selenium,” said Rowlands. “This is a material that was first used in photocopiers. We used the ideas related to photocopying technology to make a large area sensor and looked at different methods of reading out the image created on the selenium layer. We investigated 10 or 15 methods to find the best way of producing images and, at some point, we concentrated on what’s called active matrix readout, the same technology that’s used in laptop displays and LCD monitors.
“Active matrix flat panel imagers are excellent imaging systems, but they’re very expensive, so we went back to the drawing board and looked for something which produced the same image quality, if not better, and that could be made much more cheaply.”
A complete digital mammographic suite using active matrix technology can cost close to a million dollars. By using X-ray Light Valve technology which allows X-ray images to be read off a liquid crystal layer on a scanner, Rowlands hopes to reduce the cost of a detector by about a third.
“It’s very complicated to make a system based on the active matrix approach,” he explained. “The active matrix flat panels are made in the same manufacturing plants that are used to manufacture large flat panel TVs, but they’re made in much smaller quantities.”
A typical flat panel manufacturing plant that churns out thousands of TVs an hour may only have orders for 1,000 flat panels a year for digital radiography.
“They can make all the panels required by a company in a couple of hours, but it may take a day or two to change over production,” said Rowlands.
XLV Diagnostics will develop the technology, demonstrate its feasibility and either license it to manufacturers or manufacture the units itself.
“No one else is working on this,” said Rowlands. “We’re the sole proponents of this technology. It’s a very novel approach. Others have looked at it and made some small contributions, but we’re the only ones actively working on it.”
The technology will initially be used for digital mammography because the detectors are smaller and easier to build, but it can also be used for other radiographic applications.
Funding to assist in the commercialization process has been provided by the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research with support from the Thunder Bay Regional Research Institute, the Sunnybrook Research Institute and MaRS Innovation.
http://xlvdiagnostics.com
www.tbrri.com
