November 20, 1995, Montreal, Canada - Perception Inc., a medical device development company; and Matrox, a supplier of PC-based imaging technology, today announced shipment of the first clinical evaluation units of a PC-based ultrasound imaging system. The "HRS Scanner System" is a cost-effective alternative to hard-wired ultrasound systems, and Perception will be able to provide continually better price/performance as new generations of more powerful, yet less expensive PCs hit the market.

Perception was founded with a mandate to exploit the power of off-the-shelf PC hardware and software to develop inexpensive, easier-to-use, and more flexible ultrasound machines. The heart of Perception Inc.'s system is a Pentium-powered computer. Added to this platform is a high-performance Matrox frame grabber for image capture, transfer and display; and the Matrox Imaging Library (MIL-32) software for application development. The operator interface and system control is Perception's unique "Virtual Console®" control system, built using Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0 running under Microsoft Windows NT 3.51.

In order to develop a PC-based ultrasound system, Perception needed to find off-the-shelf hardware and software that could handle the requirements. The Pentium processor can easily perform many functions previously based on custom hardware; especially using powerful software tools, such as MIL-32, a 32-bit library of optimized commands for image processing. However, to use the CPU efficiently, it must have real-time access to the image data. A Matrox board fit the bill. During a scan, the sonographer moves a hand-held probe over the region of interest. The hardware generates a video signal, which is digitized by the frame grabber. The card then transfers the data to the system RAM in real-time. Perception decided on Matrox hardware since it was a cost-effective solution with both real-time transfer capabilities and an integrated display. Albert Vara, Perception's chief software engineer, says that several cards and software tools were evaluated and "we selected the Matrox video card because it offers superior resolution and because of the ease of integrating the MIL software with our own "Virtual Console®".

The "Virtual Console®" control system represents a significant advance in the ultrasound industry, since it replaces hardware-based knobs, levers, and switches with "virtual knobs" represented as software-generated icons on the computer's monitor. Features are activated and adjusted by either a touch screen or mouse. The console can be custom-configured, so that minor software alterations can be made.

Today's powerful software tools made the development of the "Virtual Console®" control system possible. Even the major provider of the software tools sees the "Virtual Console®" as pushing the frontiers of software development. Last month, the "Virtual Console®" was highlighted by Microsoft during their satellite-broadcast of "Developer Days". Jon Roskill, director of Visual Basic Marketing for Microsoft Corp. called the "Virtual Console®" an "innovative and exciting use of Visual Basic 4.0."

"By using generally available hardware and software, Perception's system is not only less costly to build and to maintain, but also more flexible," according to Albert Vara, the company's chief software engineer. Vara explains that the "Virtual Console®" can be easily tailored to the user's requirements, whether by type of procedure, remote or on-site interpretation and various languages. The system's flexibility is also evidenced by its ability to be easily upgraded with off-the-shelf components.

According to Spiro Plagakis, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Matrox, there is a growing number of OEMs and integrators in image analysis, machine vision, and medical imaging, who are discovering that the PC platform has the power they need at a price they can afford, "Perception Inc. is an example of an entrepreneurial company who saw an opportunity and went for it. Just like many of our customers, Perception Inc. is taking advantage of downward price pressures in their own markets and meeting the demand for less costly systems, by using advanced PC-based imaging technology . They are able to maintain or even surpass the performance of previous systems, which were usually based on expensive custom hardware."

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