At QUEL Imaging, we help teams build, optimize, and verify their fluorescence imaging systems for clinical applications with rigorously characterized tissue-mimicking optical phantoms.
If you’re reading this, you may already be well-versed in the world of fluorescence, but you also likely know how difficult it can be to explain the concepts to family, friends or maybe executives? But once you show them the power to see in the NIR, to see through tissue, to show perfusion, to find cancerous tissue hidden beneath tissue, the value becomes clear.
Our goal is to accelerate clinical NIRF technology adoption and a powerful demonstration can go a long way. We believe there is a lot of this potential for new technologies in this field. Our optical phantoms are designed to help at every stage of clinical translation, from early development, to marketing and user training. To help shape this narrative, and prove we’re not just selling fancy blocks of plastic with invisible features, we decided we needed to build a portable fluorescence imaging system we could bring on the road with us.
We wanted to share our development process, as it may be beneficial to others just getting into the field. Here, we will walk through our product realization process starting with defining user needs and design constraints. We will periodically revisit these concepts and show how to use our reference targets to characterize and improve imaging performance. We expect this will provide you with a practical framework to adapt to your own imaging system development needs.
There is a limit to how much information can be conveyed with a poster or marketing flyers. Fluorescence imaging is a highly technical, but highly visual concept. Ultimately, we needed a way to physically demonstrate the value of our reference targets.
So as any good engineering team might do, we decided to build something. Namely, a demo NIR fluorescence imaging system to easily demonstrate the features of our phantom and tools.
We had a clear sense of what this imaging system needed to accomplish, but like any device development project, the requirements needed to be specific enough to guide design decisions while leaving room for practical tradeoffs.
We knew what we really needed:
Just as important was understanding what we did NOT need but might consider expanding upon down the road.
With this in mind, we hit the ground running with technical requirements.
Luckily we’ve done this before. So he had a good sense of where to start.
After some back-and-forth internally, we settled on a design concept and mockup that satisfied most of our needs:
The concept lets us acquire and display NIR fluorescence images in a compact, low-power, and portable manner that won't get us stopped by TSA or risk blinding prospective customers. We even ended up adding some simple mechanical features to shield our phantoms from environmental stray light and added some shelves to display our phantoms and optimize limited space available at trade shows.
But there’s a lot more to the story. We needed to find the right components, figure out how to package them, and develop a software system for seamless demonstrations. And there is a lot more to optimize. Check back again soon as we dive deeper into our design decisions and how we aim to characterize and improve system performance.
If you need help designing and characterizing your imaging system, reach out to see if our team can help!