Every week around 10 million medical ultrasound examinations are performed globally. Surprisingly, despite being by far the most used imaging modality, it is the most-error prone diagnostic technology.
The problem is that ultrasound is very much operator dependent: approximately 90% of ultrasound procedures are done by an operator who is not the physician who actually writes the diagnosis - he captures the “image freeze” picture or video clip of the area of interest (i.e. the scan) and delivers it to the expert physician in charge - the radiologist - who “off-line” (even some days after) analyses the scan and elaborates the diagnosis.
This workflow conceals the Pandora’s box of inefficiencies and, even worse, misdiagnoses in ultrasound imaging: the radiologist is only a viewer and the static images or video clip of the case available do not allow him/her to see what he might really want to see, preventing a further investigation of the site and losing crucial data only available in real time during the patient’s scan.
This leads to patients’ recalls, adoption of more expensive imaging techniques (e.g. CT or MRI) or, in the worse cases, misdiagnoses.
iNNOGING's mission is to revolutionise the medical ultrasound workflow by providing a novel solution to enable every doctor to remotely see and analyse offline ultrasound scans as if he was next to the patient, transforming data taken from the ultrasound machine into a 3D representation of the scanned area that can be manipulated, analyzed and evaluated – just like an actual ultrasound examination (offline like Realtime).
iNNOGING's solution changes the way the organ is presented to the doctor, who can now observe it from every angle, even those that were not presented to him in the original study.
The solution includes hardware and software: the hardware is made of proprietary probe and pad, which coupled with our image processing algorithms provide radiologists with seamless data of the actual ultrasound exam.
This Phase 1 project focused on studying key technological and business enabling factors for the commercialization of the system. To this scope, at the current stage of development it is crucial to validate the User Experience of the full system (hardware, software and Graphic User Interface) with world renowned radiologists mainly from Europe, who can give us feedback on the system performances as well as become first testimonials of the iNNOGING's innovation. Besides, we need to produce evidence-based data on the economic and societal benefits for the National Healthcare Systems when adopting the iNNOGING's technology with respect to current practices and workflows. Finally, we need to run an in-depth customer validation (PACS and ultrasound equipment manufacturers), to ensure full interoperability of iNNOGING with their products and to figure out the optimal sales and marketing strategy. This will allow us finalizing the business plan for the market introduction in 2021.
