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Image Guided Therapy

Image Guided Therapy (IGT) develops medical devices destined to the treatment of cancer. Recently, new cancer treatment approaches based on local tumor ablation have received much attention from the medical community. Thermal ablation therapy, which rely on the principle that the tumor is not removed (like in a surgical resection) but rather destroyed in place by elevating the temperature within the tumorous tissues above a lethal threshold, appears as a very promising technique for localized cancer treatment. Minimally invasive Thermal ablation procedures are particularly well tolerated by the patients and require reduced hospital stays. In this context, IGT develops patient friendly, non invasive, image guided ablation devices based on focused ultrasound (also called FUS or HIFU).

IGT strive to provide coherent products designs based on four essential guidelines (the four pillars of therapeutic device design):

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  • Patient safety
  • Clinical efficacy
  • Treatment reliability
  • Procedure cost effectiveness.

The resulting functional requirements are:

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  • MR temperature imaging during the whole treatment to monitor in real time the ablation process
  • volumetric ablation to ensure complete tumor destruction.
  • Adaptive feedback to adjust treatment parameters during the procedure based on actual temperature measurements.
  • Fast ablation through real time optimization of the heating pattern.
  • Easy learning curve for the clinician.

IGT products embody the technological choices made to comply with our four essential design guidelines and the resulting functional requirements.

  • Thermoguide is a software destined to help the clinician monitor thermal ablation procedures with MR based temperature maps.
  • TargetedFUS is a complete MR controlled, focused ultrasound based, ablation device. It uses phased array technology to provide volumetric ablation while retaining reliable MR based temperature images.
  • LabFUS is a totally non invasive device which enables precise heating of a targeted volume to a very well controlled temperature. Based on MR controlled focused ultrasound, the device is extremely configurable to fill the needs of experimental research. It is the instrument of choice to perform in vivo studies of molecular imaging, local drug delivery, temperature induced gene expression or even ultrasound-mediated gene transfection (sonoporation). LabFUS comes in two configurations. One is particularly well suited to high field MR with a small bore, like the Bruker 7T BioSpec and ClinScan systems. The other is a tabletop system to be used in any standard MR system on the market (1.5T or 3T, Siemens, Philips or GE)