Jennifer Young, DeepSight Technology - Redefining Ultrasound Imaging w/NeedleVue™ | LSI Europe '24

Jennifer Young 00:02  
Hi, I'm Dr. Jennifer Young. I'm an interventional radiologist, and I am on the Medical Advisory Board for DeepSight Technology. We're a five-year-old company based in Santa Clara, California. We are focused on medical ultrasound imaging with a disruptive sensing technology that we developed. It has immense applications in medical imaging and procedures. I'm super excited to tell you about two products we're bringing to market. One is Needle View, which I'm going to be talking about extensively, and the other is Echo Lux. This is our premium ultrasound system, and it has a 40 dB or 100 times improvement in SNR (signal-to-noise ratio). As for me, I'm an interventional radiologist. This means I do minimally invasive surgeries using ultrasound, CTs, and fluoroscopy or X-rays. Some of my procedures are very easy, and some of them are very difficult. Imagine it's 2 a.m., my pager goes off, and it's a patient in the emergency department. They're bleeding profusely. They're dying. The reason they're bleeding is because their liver is diseased. They have cirrhosis, and I have to do a procedure to connect the portal vein to the hepatic vein to bypass the blood. I do this by taking a large needle through a tiny incision in the neck, traveling down and puncturing into the vessel, and then creating a shunt to bypass the blood. In real life, it looks like this. You see a portal vein and a hepatic vein, and at the end, the white arrows are pointing to this shunt. However, in real life, it doesn't look like the anatomy diagram on fluoro. We can't see the liver. We can't see the portal vein, the hepatic vein, the hepatic artery, the bile ducts. And so what we end up doing is we're just skewering this needle through the liver over and over until we reach into the portal vein. Very high morbidity procedure, very technically challenging. There are methods we use to help guide us in this procedure, but none of them are very good. And here's a chart which is showing on the very far side. This is the amount of radiation that procedures take. So that one in the box you can see how tall it is. This is the TIPS procedure. This is the procedure I'm describing, and it uses an immense amount of radiation. This is not only radiation to the patient; this is radiation to me and to my team. So I've been thinking about this issue for a long time, and there must be a better way. So I was at SIR this year, which is the Interventional Radiology convention in the United States, and I was walking around and I saw this booth. I thought, "Oh, just another ultrasound fusion booth." But I looked a little closer and I saw there's a main probe per normal, looking at a phantom, showing some tumors, but there's a second ultrasound picture, and it's coming from the viewpoint of a needle, a 22-gauge needle. And so what's happening is that this needle is able to determine whether it's in and out of plane in real-time. And from the tip of the needle, it's able to see the viewpoint of the needle. And this is a picture from that session where you can see the phantom and see the tumor in real-time from the needle tip. So my mind was racing. I was very excited. This is going to be the missing key to my dream TIPS procedure. Imagine you place an internal fiducial on a wire inside the portal vein, then put Needle View on the tip of our TIPS needle. Now, with absolute accuracy, all I have to do is touch my needle tip into the portal vein, and I can do a one-puncture TIPS procedure without any radiation. Additionally, from the tip of the needle, I can see the portal vein, and this is a real picture from our practice, the cow liver, and the one view is from the ultrasound probe, and the other view is from the tip of my needle, and I can see that portal vein as clear as day. But that's not all. The applications are endless. I don't know about you guys, but my patients are generally quite large, and the depth of our ultrasound is very deep, and their livers are very diseased, very echogenic. When you have such deep penetration with a needle, that echogenic needle tip is lost. It's just one little bright pixel amongst many other bright pixels, but when you turn on Needle View, immediately you know where your needle tip is with absolute certainty. You don't have to wonder anymore. You don't have to jiggle your needle to make little echoes appear. You just know this can be applied to ablation procedures. You put this Needle View on the tip of a cryo probe or a microwave probe, now you can know exactly where your needle tips are and when you want to build isotherms. So making an ice ball, you can do that very accurately because every single needle tip, you can track it and know exactly its position. And not only that, you can also see the tumor directly as you're entering into it. So you know when you're entering into a tumor that may be deeper that you won't be visualizing so well. So the applications are endless. I put needles inside of people every single day, every single part of their body, and Needle View can be used in any one of those circumstances. So our sensor is tiny. It can go on any catheter, needle sheath probe without impacting its performance. It's disposable. It's easy to manufacture. It doesn't require any external GPS field like other GPS locators on the market do. It's inert. It doesn't emit anything, and it's impervious to magnetic fields, impervious to temperature, which is really great for cryoablation and microwave ablation. It's a plug-and-play solution. It works on any transducer, any frequency, any angle. There's no calibration required, and the imaging from the tip of the needle includes anything a regular ultrasound can do: Doppler, color flow, elastography. It is so easy and so safe to use; it will certainly become the new standard of care. And I pride myself as an interventionist. I am the best at putting a needle in someone, but this makes it so easy. I think any physician could be able to do it. So we're currently working with other hospitals, including the NIH, and our value proposition is clear. We're going to be submitting for FDA clearance and 510(k) at the end of this year. All right, thank you for your time. It was a pleasure to tell you about this technology, and we'll be standing outside of the room for further questions. And we welcome partnering with strategics and applying our technology to your devices.