1. At the ECM level, electronics is graded for consumer, industrial, military and medical use. What informs this grading system? I guess medical and military grade electronics is priced higher, why?.
2. At ECM level how is the final price computed? This is important noting that some manufacturers have agreed to package low cost version of their equipment for certain target market mostly based on ‘technical economics (TE)’. Based on my experience in industry, TE involves finding a suitable low priced substitute that will not compromise functionality/performance inorder to bring down the price of the final product. In the case of the present article TE would be realised by using a consumer grade camera in place of the expensive medical grade canera. Te most obvious question is what is being sacrified in terms of functionality and performance?
3. Licensing comes at a cost and it is only natural for any business to try and recover the licensing expenses. Can licensing be achieved cheaply and if so how?

This is a challenging debate since both medical and military technologies concerns life and death.

Comments?

Mark Pierce

Jen – We are carrying out studies using this imaging system with clinicians specializing in oral cancer, cervical cancer, esophageal cancer, and colon cancer. By building up a larger collection of images with independent diagnosis made by traditional pathology methods, we hope to establish the characteristic differences in cell size and shape between normal tissue and cancer.

Jerry – This system has a field of view of 0.75 mm diameter. The size of a typical cell that we are looking at is approzimately 0.03-0.05 mm. If you look at figure 4 in the PLoS article (the link is above), hopefully you can see the difference between normal and cancer cells. Cell nuclei appear as small green dots in the images. In normal tissue, the cell nuclei are small and well spaced apart. In cancerous tissue, nuclei tend to become larger and more crowded together.

Ken – As I mentioned in my reply to Jen, we are currently carrying out larger studies with this system to establish its diagnostic performance in several different cancer types. Hopefully it will be in the hands of the pathologist soon.