Today marks the first day of the 2010 Winter Olympic in Vancouver, which is also where our North American head office is located. The Olympic fever has hit the office strong and has been spreading faster than the contagious cold going around the office. This week our Director of Operations Accounting, Li Wei Xiao, brought in the Olympic torch her husband ran with. Below are some of the “Olympic game faces” the staff put on for pictures.

As we enter in our 10th year of operation, it is nice to reflect back and see how we’ve grown. A recent photograph shows the team that started in 2000/2001, some of us with more hair, some of us with less, but still the same great group.

From left to right, back to front: Tomas Bobovsky, Software Engineer; Barry “Joe” Irish, Principal Investor; Laurent Pelissier, Founder/CEO; Sergio Bernardo, Mechanical Engineer; Trevor Hansen, Software Engineer; Thang To, Manager – Repair & Logistics; James Chung, Manufacturing Team Lead; Kris Dickie, Software Engineer.

Our lovely and cheerful Lisa Chow from our North American office will be taking a month away from work here at Ultrasonix so that she can be a part of the 2010 winter olympics. Lisa, according to a recent email, is “ready to put [her] blood, sweat, tears, and passion into the games” starting February 3rd.

During the games, Lisa will be helping out with logistics and will also serve as an assistant and guide to corporate executives. Judging by the excellent work she accomplishes here in the office day in and day out, I’m sure she’ll serve as a great representative for the games. Lisa hopes by the end of this tenure that she will be known, in her own words, as “the HOSTESS with the MOSTEST.”

On behalf of everyone in the Richmond Office i’d like to thank (from left to right) Serpil, Kelly, Frances, Li Wei, Lisa, Jimmy, Roderick and Anna (the only one missing on the picture!…) for a great event in Grouse Mountain…. Ziplining was fun trying and I think everyone really enjoyed the evening as well…

Some pics are uploaded on flickr… Nice view up there…

We would like to congratulate Reza Zahiri-Azar on successfully defending his Ph.D this week. Reza is a graduate of the University of British Columbia and a part-time employee of Ultrasonix. He is also the inventor of the real-time elastography mode used on the Sonix systems.

We hope he won’t make us address him as Dr. in the office from now on

Congrats!

We are pleased to announce the winner of the 1st annual Ultrasonix Student Award. This award is given to the university student who makes the largest impact on the Ultrasonix research community through their:

- Contribution to open-source programs and code that help the research community
- Active support of other students with questions related to Sonix RP and SonixTOUCH Research usage

The award consists of $1000 for the student and a transducer for their lab.

This year’s award is split between two students who have both made equally excellent contributions to the research forum.

Congratulations to both winners!

- Thor Andreas Tangen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

- Michael Stauffer, University of Pennsylvania

The engineering team here at Ultrasonix is focused on delivering reliable and durable products to market. One tool we use to determine possible issues is to run a series of tests on a vibration table to simulate real world transport and daily use conditions. We applied random vibration and shock loading to the Sonix Touch system to see how it would perform. Check out the video showing the Sonix Touch on the Vibration Table.
The system performed quite well. Using Solid State Harddrives ensures system recovery even after aggressive random vibration and shock loading with power being applied to the system.

SonixGPS was the most talked about product on the show floor of this years ASA. Several luminaries joked that they were no longer necessary to teach needle guidance and one doctor said it was the greatest addition to ultrasound in 20 years.

The most respected luminaries from every corner of the world came and played with SonixTOUCH and SonixGPS. Almost all of them had an “Ah Ha” moment once they saw the needle come out exactly where the “X” was on the screen.

Our booth was extremely crowded and at times we had several of the most respected names in Regional Anesthesia scanning side by side.

Ultrasonix recently attended the IEEE Ultrasonics conference in Rome with great success. We showcased the SonixTOUCH Research platform and had excellent feedback. Not only did we meet with new faces, but also got to reconnect with dozens of customers who are using various Ultrasonix research systems.

A few highlights:
- Almost half of the presentations for medical ultrasound research reference the Sonix devices. This is attributed to our dedication to providing custom solutions to researchers as well as our real-time customer support via our research forum and documentation wiki
- IEEE held an industrial forum for the first time, and Ultrasonix go to present there. We did a 15 minute presentation to over 50 individuals, and got to talk about the SonixTOUCH and it’s research capabilities

On October 9, we invited various customers and other ultrasound research laboratories from the UK to our offices in High Wycombe, a suburb of London. Again, we demonstrated the SonixTOUCH research, and got to listen to a great presentation from University College London on their prostate biopsy research being performed using the Sonix RP system. Great feedback and great attendees made this fun and I definitely look forward to holding more mini-forums for our researchers, in UK and abroad.

ACEP was an outstanding show for Ultrasonix…. We are investing more heavily and with more focus to address our key markets – Emergency Medicine is one of our primary target markets and we elected to support this event significantly this year. Our presence was well noticed as our footprint was larger than most other Ultrasound Companies. You can tell this year the larger medical companies have cut marketing budgets and their presence was much reduced compared to last year – which gives us more visibility.

The key message we want to convey our customers is that we listen to their input, and look at their entire set of clinical needs. Rather than provide “yet another ultrasound machine” and only address Imaging and Form Factor, we are focused in providing better value to our customers by addressing Workflow, Connectivity as well as standardization/compliance/QA and Billing. We provide solutions that are specifically designed for our customers, in of our primary markets. What enables that flexibility is our OpenSONIX software-based platform that can accept Plug-ins solutions.

For Emergency Medicine, Ultrasonix offers unique solutions that addresses the entire continuum of care:

1)       SonixTOUCH, combined with SonixHUB is a unique solution that provides for streamlined workflow. We designed this solution with the help of our Emergency Medicine customers, with simplicity and ease of use in mind for departments that do their own credentialing. More info in the SonixTOUCH EMed page….

2)       SonixTOUCH, combined with eHealthConnex, also provides for streamlined workflow and seamless integration with eHealthConnex online QA and Credentialing tool, that would be the solution of choice when overread needs to be done remotely.

The show had very good attendance this year and we have a record number of leads – we are also planning to get more direct sales coverage on Board after talking a few new potential representatives.

The other technology that drew a lot of attention is SonixGPS – more soon on this one… Almost everyone who saw it thought it will revolutionize medicine, we are quite excited about releasing this soon. It further reinforces our focus in providing unique, better workflow solutions for our users.

A few pictures of the show…