R&D Facilities

Research Laboratory

Focus Surgery has assembled an advanced acoustic R & D laboratory for imaging and high power ultrasound projects and experiments.

The Fry Acoustic Research Lab ("wet laboratory") has been set up in a dedicated 530 square foot facility that houses the ultrasound characterization tools and equipment described below. All water-tanks, experiment tables, and equipment are easy to access and configurable for all ultrasound-related experiments and activities.

Clinical

The Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis and Focus Surgery have established a long term working relationship to perform clinical trials and research.

Animal

Focus Surgery can perform in-vivo animal studies at the Indiana University School of Medicine where an accredited animal experimental facility (Laboratory Animal Research Center: LARC, overseen by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee: IACUC) is made available to Focus Surgery.

Computers

Focus Surgery maintains a tightly integrated computer network made-up of high performance computers well suited for advanced design work.  Major software development efforts are supported under Unix, Windows, and Windows NT, under a version control software environment. Most of the work is carried out using high level programming languages and development tools (C, C++, Java, Matlab).

Office/Focus Surgery, Inc. Facilities

Focus Surgery leases about 7,400 square feet of space that houses all staff, laboratory, and service facilities. All professional activities related to engineering design, software development and maintenance are performed using our local area network. In addition, computerized accounting, financial and inventory control for manufacturing and service activities of the SB500 systems are supported using integrated software on the company computer cluster by internal network. Focus Surgery is an ISO 9001-2000 certified company for product development and manufacturing.

Other Facilities, Machine Shop

Focus Surgery maintains Solidworks software stations for 3-D modeling of mechanical engineering design and production of machine parts. A milling machine with digital readout, lathe, saw, grinders, cutters, drill press and other wood, plastic and metal fabrication equipment are housed in the Focus Surgery machine shop. Grinders with diamond cutting wheels for transducer crystal cutting and shaping are also available.

Other Facilities, Electronics Shop

Focus Surgery maintains an OrCAD software system for electronic circuit design, simulation, and layout. Several electronics workbenches are available at Focus Surgery for assembly and testing of printed circuit boards and other product-related parts. These include several soldering/desoldering stations, digital and analog oscilloscopes (50MHz to 1 GHz), logic analyzers, various power supplies and complete tool sets to accomplish the proposed work.

Major Equipment

The most important piece of equipment to this project is the unique availability at Focus Surgery of the Sonablate^® 500 HIFU system and transrectal probes (including all software and hardware development tools) and three EUB-525 Hitachi diagnostic general purpose imaging systems with several transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) array imaging probes.

Other important pieces of equipment are: an optical Schlieren system (Optison, manufactured by Intech Research Co.) for acoustic beam pattern characterization, a multiple channel thermometry system, and several tissue equivalent phantoms.

A general-purpose ultrasound transducer characterization station and HIFU test station is also available. This station comprises: a 600 MHz Pentium computer with GPIB, digital I/O, and analog I/O capabilities, two digital Tektronix 300 MHz oscilloscopes with GPIB interface, a Panametrics pulser/receiver, a 100 MHz PC-card waveform digitizer, a general-purpose GPIB arbitrary function generator, frequency counters, a 3-axis Velmex XYZ stepper-motor system with 10um resolution, 400W and 200W RF power amplifiers with forward- and backward RF power measurement capability, Bird watt meters, a watertank and filtration system, uncalibrated needle hydrophones, a calibrated membrane hydrophone, total acoustic power (TAP) meters, calibrated radiation force spheres and thermocouple devices for acoustic intensity and output measurements at various power levels. All instrumentation of this station is GPIB and serial-port controlled from a single Matlab environment, for quick experimental setup, data collection, and analysis.

Other equipment at Focus Surgery includes a HP network analyzer for electrical transducer characterization, a HP frequency spectrum analyzer, two ultrasound acoustic power meters, variable and fixed power supplies, 20-channel high power HIFU phased array driving system, 320-channel low power HIFU phased array driving system (1-5 MHz), low noise, wide bandwidth ultrasound signal amplifiers, several fixed-focus, general-purpose transducers, two stand-alone water degassing systems, several watertanks, and other miscellaneous mounting/positioning/experimentation setup clamps and associated hardware.

The Sonablate^® is an investigational device limited by Federal Law to investigational use in the United States.

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