Cubresa receives US patent for flexible imaging sensors

Cubresa granted US patent for flexible imaging sensors.

Instead of a cloak of invisibility hiding a person in television and movies, a new method that describes mounting many imaging sensors underneath a flexible substrate could reveal tumors within humans or animals.

Cubresa Inc., a medical imaging company that develops and markets nuclear imaging systems, today announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued US Patent 9,322,930, covering a novel arrangement of imaging sensors and methods for determining sensor positions for 3D imaging.

“The best imaging places cameras as close as possible to the surface of the subject’s skin,” said James Schellenberg, co-inventor and founder and CTO of Cubresa. “This has been a problem with humans and other live animals. For example, the curvature of a woman’s breast and underarm area, where imaging of cancer and lymph node involvement is needed, is topographically complex and will vary from woman to woman.”

Instead of mechanically rotating a camera or cameras around the area or having a person move a camera by hand, Cubresa’s technique places a large number of small imaging sensors under a flexible substrate that can be easily adjusted to fit the subject. The exact positioning of each sensor is determined, and sophisticated software algorithms create 3D images out of the many 2D images from each sensor.

“Flexible imaging sensors could be used in preclinical as well as clinical applications,“ said George Abe, Cubresa’s CEO. “Disease mechanisms are extraordinarily complex,” says Abe, “and we’re developing products with greater precision and resolution that can allow scientists and clinicians to achieve their goal of better understanding disease and developing more personalized therapies.

“You might say that we could personalize the camera for the patient for more precise treatment that enables more personalized medicine.”