Based on NI LabVIEW rapid development of medical electronics equipment (1)

For the medical device industry's investment in recent years has been at the rising stage, over the past two years, the medical equipment of almost doubles the risk investment, 2007 reached 40 million.

Whether from a global perspective in the Chinese market, small, not listing of medical device manufacturers with product, market and innovative elements, is gradually becoming investment. For these small companies, from fierce competition in a firm foothold and stand out is a very difficult thing. Their core technical personnel may be experts in the field of biology and medicine, and master a certain patent or research results, but how do I in team personnel very limited circumstances, fast will patent or research results into products, and to guarantee product reliability and stability are very difficult. Through the NI's LabVIEW graphical development environment and commercial embedded prototyping platform, domain experts or technicians can seamlessly integrate hardware I/O and algorithm, in a limited number of people in the development of medical devices under the fast, mainly divided into three areas:

1. most of the experts in the field — here refers to doctors and biomedical engineers — mainly specialized in diagnosis, treatment improvement and innovation, rather than a complex electronic, mechanical or embedded solutions.

Through the NI provides seamless integration of hardware and software platform, they can focus on diagnosis and treatment of technology itself, not the underlying system implementation details.

2. fast function prototyping validation to early in product development to attract the next round of venture capital.

NI is a few family provides solutions for rapid prototyping, for companies to rapidly build system prototype provides a variety of hardware and software characteristics.

3. the body of a weak signal needs to be sufficiently high precision analog acquisition, NI is a PC-based test and measurement technology pioneer and leader in providing industry-leading data capture device.

This article will introduce the three initial stage of the company based on LabVIEW graphical development platform for medical device design.

OptiMedica

OptiMedica Corporation based on the NI graphical development platform developed for diagnosis and treatment of diabetic retinopathy in new laser treatment instrument.

Laser treatment is mainly through emitting laser pulse, aiming at the closure of micro-Hemangioma and abnormal vascular leakage. Due to the complexity of the operation and precision, in the last 35 years this laser sighting emission by doctor manual control. LabVIEW FPGA and NI R series devices for innovative laser treatment platform, through a high-precision, automated control system, auxiliary physicians to certain mode every time aim at the launch of multiple laser pulses, thus speeding up the operation speed, reduce the number of courses.

Figure 1.

The PASCAL Photocoagulator from OptiMedica was prototyped and deployed using LabVIEW and LabVIEW FPGA on a NI R Series intelligent DAQ device.

OptiMedica research and development team has certain LabVIEW development experience, in order to shorten the product development and certification cycle, they decided to use LabVIEW FPGA and the NI R Series intelligent data acquisition devices, eliminating the Board-level design, hardware validation, and so a lot of work.

Through the graphical development environment and commercialization of hardware platform, the development team quickly and efficiently develop treatment instrument of prototype system and successfully system features presented to potential investors. Since the R series device built-in FPGA, the hardware solution improves system reliability, and easier to obtain FDA certification. Using programmable FPGA instead of custom ASIC chip will development time is reduced by 30%.

Sanarus Medical

Sanarus is a medical devices startups.

They plan to develop a revolutionary type of surgical equipment Visica2 treatment system (V2), via cryosurgery kill the tumor outpatients. V2 design goal is to be placed on the doctor's Office or clinic in the use of the instrument. Treatment process includes painless local anesthesia and real-time-focus ultrasonic positioning. Treatment duration is about 10 to 20 minutes, through a small incision to freeze and kill the target organization. Postoperative patients with and without a PIN.

Figure 2.

The Visica 2 from Sanarus Medical was prototyped and deployed using LabVIEW and the CompactRIO embedded platform.