Emerging Tech
Israeli company Nanox wants to take the standard issue X-ray machine into the future — and it has turned to a design straight out of Star Trek to help it achieve that goal.
Called the Nanox Arc, this Star Trek biobed-looking medical imaging machine promises to make medical scanning available to people around the world at a significantly lower cost and with a much smaller footprint than current machines. Rather than the daunting CT scans found in today’s hospitals, the Nanox Arc is a portable bed, intended to make the patient feel more at ease while scanning is carried out.
“Nanox has achieved the world’s first commercial-grade digital X-ray source, without the use of heat,” Ran Poliakine, founder and CEO of Nanox, told Digital Trends. “This X-ray device enables pulsating electron beams, versus the continuous radiation of X-rays used today. Building a silicon-based ‘electron nano gun’, placed on a silicon chip, has made Nanox’s method more efficient than the traditional way of heat-based filaments.”
Without the need to produce heat, the “cold cathode” can be made between 70-90% smaller. This also reduces the cost. “This enables us to use multiple tubes in a stationary tube array, and not rely on one or two tubes in a rotating gantry,” Poliakine continued. “This ‘no moving parts’ solution, coupled with the cold electron nano gun, creates a medical imaging system that provides the same imaging capabilities of traditional X-rays, minus the cost and radiation.”
Nanox believes that its Nanox Arc tech could play a key part in making medical imaging more readily accessible to people around the world. (It’s also introducing a revolutionary pay-per-scan approach to scans, which means hospitals would not have to buy machines outright.)Oh, and as for that resemblance to the Star Trek biobed? It’s totally not a coincidence. “The Starfleet’s unsung hero allowed doctors to assess and diagnose their patients in minutes, and allowed them to conduct any medical imaging scan necessary, efficiently,” Poliakine said. “The biobed served multiple purposes, and that is exactly what we are aiming to achieve. We want the Arc to be accessible, portable, easy to operate and focus on what’s important: the patient.”
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/nanox-arc-x-ray-machine/
Foxconn teams up with Nanox to make futuristic X-ray machines
Published January 16, 2020 — 12:59 UTC
Foxconn announced it has invested in Israel-based startup Nanox, to produce futurist and affordable X-ray machines. Apart from leading a round of $26 million investment, the Taiwanese company will also help with manufacturing these machines.
The X-ray machine, called Nanox.arc, looks quite cool and only weighs around 70 kg. So, it’s very portable as compared to traditional X-ray machines that usually weigh a couple of hundred kilos
Nanox said the idea is to make available where the traditional hospitals or clinics are not available. Apart from X-ray, the device will also support other scans such as CT, mammography, fluoroscopy, and angiogram.
The machine is paired with the company’s proprietary software Nanox.Cloud, that provides end-to-end medical imaging service offering image repository, radiologist matching, online and offline diagnostics review and annotation, connectivity to diagnostic assistive artificial intelligence systems, billing, and reporting.
Ran Poliakine, Founder & CEO of Nanox, talking to TNW on a call, said his aim is to make preventive scanning available to more people by making affordable and portable X-ray machines:
Nanox.arc is an affordable X-ray solution that will be priced around $10,000. That’ll help medical institutions invest into other equipments instead of spending thousands and millions of dollars on traditional scanning machines.
Poliakine said the system uses AI for better diagnosis: Nanox’s in-house AI works on making the best image available to radiologists using 3D reconstruction, and a third-party AI — such as Google’s recent model that catches breast cancer through X-rays —can assist experts making the right diagnosis.
Poliakine added another advantage of this machine is that it can startup and shut down immediately unlike traditional machines.
The company aims to start shipping the product by the first half of 2020. It aims to ship close to 15,000 machines in the next two years. Poliakine said a network of over 15,000 machines will also boost medical research with over 300,000 images being collected daily. He said currently, research on medical AI suffers from the lack of data, that’s where Nanox can step in and provide ample data.
https://thenextweb.com/plugged/2020/01/16/foxconn-teams-up-with-nanox-to-make-futuristic-x-ray-machines/