Fans of science fictions films have all seen medical equipment that miraculously heals any ailment, and often it looks like this. Nanox have unveiled the Arc, a bio-bed that takes “digital” X-rays, which the company claims is cheaper to use, doesn’t require massive hardware needed in most hospital machinery and also easier to maintain.
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The World Health Organisation estimates that around two-thirds of the world population doesn’t have reliable access to diagnostic imaging, mostly due to prohibitive costs. This is what Nanox is trying to remedy with the Arc.
It delivered its first live demonstration from its headquarters in Isreal, which was broadcast to the Radiological Society of North America’s annual conference (online due to the pandemic). The CEO of Nanox, Ran Poliakine, demonstrated the beds by using a leg of lamb and some medical dummies for the analysis.
Several independent radiologists were present and communicated to the Society what Nanox was doing with the machine and the results it delivered. They were very complementary about the speed an accuracy at which the images were taken, especially when examining a 3D image of a chest X-ray. According to the onlookers they thought the Arc would make spotting small lesions and tumours easier due to the greater number of X-ray tubes the bed uses compared to traditional X-ray machines.
The company emerged out of the ashes of Sony’s Field Emission Display project. The tech giant was looking to build higher quality TV’s that solved the problems the displays faced in the late 90’s, the old artifacts in LCD and Plasma Screen TVs – dead pixels, flickering and burn-in. In 2009, Sony killed off the project after spending close to a billion dollars on research and development. The technology was sold to Japanese businessman, Hitoshi Masuya, who then recruited Poliakine. Since then they have been working on adapting the technology for medical imagery.
The company had a successful IPO recently and are hoping to revolutionise the science of X-rays. It remains to be seen how successful Nanox will be, but the technology is encouraging.
