KA Imaging Prepares to Shake Up Healthcare Market With Digital X-Ray Detector

Canadian manufacturer KA Imaging has managed to overcome the challenge of having soft-tissue differentiation and single exposure featured in the same digital X-ray detector. The company plans to present Reveal to the healthcare market this year. Reveal is the world’s first portable digital detector capable of separating different energy levels.
 
Using only one exposure with a conventional X-ray source, KA’s detector can present three types of images: traditional DR, soft tissue and bone. “Our patented technology eliminates the motion artifact problem often seen in traditional dual exposure dual-energy X-ray imaging systems and it’s portable,” explained Dr. Karim S. Karim, chief technology officer at KA Imaging. According to Karim, the detector also enables DR images with very high DQE (detective quantum efficiency) allowing for low radiation exposures to the patient.
 
The technology is already being tested. In the past year, more than 20 patients with lung cancer have been scanned with Reveal. A clinical trial is being held at Grand River Hospital in Kitchener, Ontario, and is expected to scan up to 30 patients.
 
KA Imaging is a University of Waterloo spin-off and has scaled rapidly since inception. The company is based in Kitchener/Waterloo, Ontario, and aims to establish itself as a major player in the X-ray detector industry.
 
“It is our commitment to provide an environment of creative freedom, empowering our employees with the necessary tools to make innovation happen. Reveal is proof that this culture is working, and we are very proud to be leading this important step in revolutionizing diagnostic X-Ray medical imaging,” said Amol Karnick, CEO at KA.
 
KA Imaging is a company that specializes in developing innovative X-ray imaging technologies and systems, providing solutions to the medical, veterinary, and NDT markets. The company specializes in providing custom expertise and engineering to meet customer needs in their respective industries. Since the company’s inception, KA Imaging has been dedicated to customer success in providing better outcomes for medical screening and diagnostics, NDT material and fault identification, and material analysis testing. The company has been steadily growing its team of professionals to provide product engineering, quality, and service to customers.
 
KA Imaging’s history of developing unique sensor technologies dates back to 2000, when co-founder Prof. Karim created the world’s first amorphous silicon active pixel sensor for real-time X-ray imaging applications during his Ph.D. work at the University of Waterloo. The active pixel sensor eventually found early commercial application in biometric fingerprint sensors. Subsequently, early research on high-resolution direct X-ray conversion CMOS cameras, multi-layer spectral (color) X-ray imaging, and high fill factor lateral photodetectors was initiated in 2007 by Prof. Karim and a team of graduate students in the nascent Silicon Thin-film Applied Research (STAR) group at Waterloo. The STAR group’s detector development program benefited from more than $5 million of Canadian government and private sector funding and early prototypes were demonstrated using the Giga-to-Nano electronics prototyping facility at the University of Waterloo.
 
STAR group’s X-ray detector work attracted seed funding from Grand Challenges Canada (a not-for-profit Canadian corporation that is also one of the largest impact-first investors in Canada) to develop a low cost medical X-ray detector in 2012. The detector was to become an integral part of point of care clinics that screen for tuberculosis, a disease that kills more than 1.5 million people annually across the world mostly in developing countries in Asia and Africa.
 
In 2015, with support from the University of Waterloo, Grand Challenges Canada and Christie Digital, Amol Karnick, Karim, and Sina Ghanbarzadeh (a STAR group alumni) founded KA Imaging to commercialize the sensor technologies developed by the STAR group into imaging products that enable better healthcare outcomes at a global level.