Medical Devices Today: SSI: Revolutionizing Breast Cancer Detection, but Slowly

Article preview from IN VIVO- April, 2010

Building off conventional ultrasound technology, France's SSI hopes to change the way breast cancer detection is done, reducing the number of unnecessary biopsies by employing elastography to register the stiffness of breast tissue. But as the company seeks to challenge a 3000 year old, low tech approach--manual palpation--company officials are proceeding slowly and are cautious about the claims they make for their technology's innovativeness.

SSI: Revolutionizing Breast Cancer Detection, but Slowly

Article preview from IN VIVO- April, 2010

For all of the advances that technology innovation brings to medicine, it's interesting how often physicians remain loyal to long-standing practices and approaches that dismiss, if not outright reject the benefit that high tech brings. Even surgeons who welcome the benefits of minimally invasive techniques mourn the loss of tactile sensation – and there's often a conservative impulse that leads many physicians to prefer to do things the way they have for years, rather than try something new.

In breast cancer detection, manual palpation is just such a long-cherished technique, one that's been around in some form for literally thousands of years. In some clinical spaces, without compelling clinical evidence, there's little that will convince a large number of physicians to try a new technology, no matter how cool it looks. If a surgeon can do a procedure through conventional open techniques and get great results, why do it any other way? That's why advocates for minimally invasive technologies often appeal to other benefits: patient comfort and convenience, reduced trauma, lower overall costs.

In the case of breast cancer detection, there's a nuance to the value proposition of new technology. Manual palpation is a reliable – and extremely non-invasive – method in screening for tumors, but the screens also often result in a large number of false-positives, meaning that many of the biopsies done in the next stage of diagnosis are unnecessary. A novel new ultrasound technology developed by a French start-up, SuperSonic Image SA (SSI), can go a long way to reducing unnecessary biopsies, using elastography to enhance sensitivity and specificity of diagnosis. The challenge for SSI: introducing a radically new diagnostic tool without disrupting established protocols and approaches. Thus, it is positioning elastography as a diagnostic tool, rather than a screening method, and has made sure that its ultrasound technology is both advanced, in its incorporation of elastography, and competitive in terms of its grayscale images, with conventional ultrasound systems against which it will compete. If it can pull that off, SSI may, in fact, revolutionize a 3,000-year-old procedure.

An engineer in training, SuperSonic Image founder and CEO Jacques Souquet received his MS in his native France and then did graduate work in the US (a PhD in physics from Stanford and an later an Executive MBA from Wharton) before joining Varian Semiconductor in the late 1970s where he worked on a variety of projects, including the first digital phase-array system for cardiac applications. By the early 1980s, Souquet had left Varian to join ultrasound pioneer ATL Ultrasound Inc. in Seattle, at the time still a small company working on Doppler ultrasound applications to measure blood flow.

-David Cassak

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