Mobile Lung CT NIH Grant Work Moves to Phase 2

Xoran Technologies has begun work on Phase 2 of their mobile lung grant with the goal to confirm the safety and utility of a future thoracic point-of-care CT system in support of an FDA 510(k) submission.

"It's hard to overstate how transformative this technology would be for us in the ICU," says Robert Dickson, MD, Associate Professor—Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine, Associate Professor—Microbiology & Immunology, and a clinical collaborator, all at the University of Michigan. "Every day, we make clinical decisions based on chest X-rays, which are limited in what they can tell us about what is going on in the chest or abdomen. Our patients are often too sick to transport down to radiology, or they have a communicable disease like COVID-19 that we don't want to spread around the hospital. A bedside scanner would have immediate impact in how we manage our sickest patients."

In 2021, Xoran Technologies was notified of a grant award from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support the company's research and development efforts for lung cone beam computed tomography (CT) imaging. Earlier this year, Xoran announced they completed Phase 1 of this grant. Just last month, Xoran submitted its 510k for TRON, an open-bore fluoroscopy CT for full-body point-of-care imaging.

"We greatly appreciate the support from NHLBI as well as a fantastic collaboration with doctors at the University of Michigan," states William van Kampen, Xoran's Chief Technology Officer and principal investigator on the project. "This grant enables us to obtain valuable clinical feedback and accelerate our commercialization of this exciting technology and help bring imaging to patients who are in great need."

This project allows Xoran to optimize a point-of-care solution specifically for lung imaging. The combined Xoran and U of M teams aim to develop a highly deployable CT scanner intended for use in ICU, especially for patients with acute respiratory failure requiring mechanical ventilation.