illumiSonics is working to accelerate real-time, touchless laser research geared to revolutionizing medical imaging with Azure

Based in Canada, illumiSonics has been hard at work over the last few years developing a new tissue imaging technology called Photoacoustic Remote Sensing (PARS). Created in partnership with PhotoMedicine Labs at the University of Waterloo, this innovative medical imaging solution is likely to have wide-ranging applications, and in the words of its creators, PARS could fundamentally change the way people use images to diagnose tissue abnormalities and disease progression.

PARS microscopy uses the physics of light-matter interaction to detect new and critical information in living tissues. In PARS, usually a pair of lasers are shone upon a patient’s body. The first laser generates sound waves that the second laser detects, allowing for the identification of something unique: the optical absorption rates of different structures within the body. By generating this new type of ultrasound image with lasers, the hope is that PARS will eliminate the traditional need for ultrasound gel and transducers, both of which must make contact with the patient’s body to be effective.

Because almost every part of the human body absorbs some amount of light, PARS can use differing wavelengths of light to examine many parts of a patient’s physiology, all the way down to a 300-nanometer resolution. Future applications of the technology may include real-time, noninvasive pathology, ophthalmology, robotic surgery, preclinical work, and medical research. “In ophthalmology, for example, we can detect the early signs of blinding diseases by measuring the blood oxygenation of eye structures down to a single red blood cell,” says Professor Parsin Haji Reza, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of illumiSonics and Director of PhotoMedicine Labs at the University of Waterloo. “We do this by taking advantage of the differences between the light absorption rates between oxyhemoglobin and deoxyhemoglobin.”

The images that PARS creates are incredibly high resolution and include high levels of detail at the cellular level. Processing and storing these images, especially at scale, requires substantial infrastructural capacity. “As we began to transition from a technology development company into a products and partnering company, our need for a scalable platform that regularly uses the latest technological advancements in hardware without requiring regular updates or maintenance on our end became paramount,” says Rocky Ganske, Chief Executive Officer of illumiSonics. “We needed a GPU-inclusive platform capable of scaling with our business and delivering the real-time results of PARS microscopy to what will soon be a steadily growing number of customers.”

Because the data in question also contains highly sensitive patient information, any platform that illumiSonics adopted needed to be highly secure. “The goal has been to adopt a platform that grants us knowledge and control over which of our images can be accessed by a given customer,” says Dr. Haji Reza. “We also need those images, which can be up to 70 gigabytes in size, to be viewable without requiring download.”

Finding the right cloud

Microsoft Azure stood out among the company’s cloud provider options—in particular, its Azure AI offerings. “Microsoft has become the industry standard for image storage in the hospital and research communities,” says Ganske. “Add to that the prospects of Azure Machine Learning and Azure Cognitive Services, and you’ve got a game-changing proposition.” illumiSonics immediately recognized the benefits of seamlessly deploying Azure-native applications with its images. “In the near future, we’ll have created a database that, in tandem with Azure Machine Learning, will enable automated colorization of specific cancer types, for example,” adds Ganske.

Azure also offers another unique benefit: the Research Center of Excellence on Cloud (RCEC), which helps institutions seamlessly migrate their research workloads to the cloud, scale their research, collaborate with partner organizations in a highly secure manner, and simplify their research computing needs. "Researchers need agility and elasticity, while IT provides enterprise security and compliance,” explains Dr. Helia Mohammadi, Chief Data Scientist and Healthcare Industry Lead for Microsoft Canda. “Designing and leading a team to deliver RCEC excites me as it is an undeniable offering that solves these challenges to accelerate innovation for researchers."

The RCEC is a turnkey research offering on Azure that includes six extensive modules. These modules include Azure onboarding, data, analytics, AI platforms, security and governance, cloud compute, collaboration and development platforms, and are further supported by training and support through Microsoft technical resources and the RCEC partner ecosystem. From blueprints and templates to data, AI, and analytics architecture samples, the RCEC empowers researchers and data scientists to leverage the power of the cloud.

As is the case with most research facilities, PhotoMedicine Labs regularly experiences sharp spikes in its computational needs. These spikes are created when a research project reaches a result-generating phase, and they’re separated by frequent, extended periods of low or no computational demand. “We might need hundreds of thousands of processing cores and GPU nodes in a day, followed by two months of relative inactivity,” says Dr. Haji Reza. “Azure provides us that sort of elasticity, and as illumiSonics grows, it will become even more important.”

Democratizing the benefits of PARS

Before adopting Azure, illumiSonics had been looking to source a powerful, GPU-powered server for its engineering optimization projects. These servers routinely cost CAD10,000 or more. “We’re very interested in using Azure to take the apps and infrastructure we’re building now and transition them to a subscription-based service for our customers,” says Ganske. “This will decrease our cost of goods sold and help us offer a better, more competitively priced solution to our eventual customers.”

The first of these new apps was created jointly by illumiSonics and Microsoft, with which remote clinicians can view PARS images and validate them through clinical study. Using a prebuilt custom vision API from Azure Cognitive Services, the app aims to help illumiSonics automatically identify multiple types of cancer cells. “We’re incredibly happy that we’ve been able to marry Azure resources with open-source code in a way that enables clinicians to view PARS images so rapidly,” says Ganske. “With Azure, we’ve created an automated, highly secure platform for near real-time viewing of color-coded PARS imagery.”

Surgeons are one group of medical professionals for whom this newly developed app could represent a sea change. For a surgeon working to excise a cancerous tumor, rapid results might eliminate the need for follow-up surgeries. “Right now, it’s impossible to definitively know how much to cut,” says Dr. Haji Reza. “After a surgery is complete, you send the biopsied tissue to the pathology lab, where results can take a few days or weeks to come back. Only then do you know if the patient needs secondary surgery.”

Dr. Haji Reza points out that up to 60 percent of breast cancer patients may require secondary surgery, increasing their risks and recovery times. Because PARS can color code imagery in much the same way a pathology lab does, there might soon come a day when surgery results are returned while the surgeon is still in the operating room, giving them the time and insight to excise an entire tumor the first time.

It’s important to note that this solution is still in development, but illumiSonics is working tirelessly to make it a reality. One way that the company hopes to speed up the development process is through the use of Azure Machine Learning. “We’re looking to Azure Machine Learning to help us accurately colorize our image generation, identify cancer cells, and build libraries of different cancer images,” says Ganske. “At illumiSonics, we’re steadily breaking new ground, and as more people begin to use PARS images for diagnostics, Azure AI will play a major role in delivering fast, accurate results.”

Helping ensure security and compliance

Keeping sensitive patient data in the right hands is as important to illumiSonics as delivering rapid, accurate PARS imagery. “The level of security that’s native to Azure, especially around confirming user identity, clearly fits our needs,” says Ganske. “Compared with other solutions, Azure is a stronghold in the clinical imaging space, and that’s because of Microsoft’s focus on safety and compliance with privacy protocols the world over.”

Because the clinical and research communities have so widely adopted Azure, illumiSonics also gains broader consistency with its clients’ systems. This uniform user interface makes customer adoption of the PARS platform simpler, and shared Azure infrastructure will similarly aid illumiSonics in its journey toward compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). “Building and validating HIPAA-compliant platforms takes a lot of investment, both in terms of money and energy,” says Ganske. “That compliant modules are already available as part of Azure is a big plus.” illumiSonics considers using these modules not only beneficial from a compliance standpoint, but also in reducing the time required to bring the PARS platform to market.

Innovating on the cusp of release

Going forward, illumiSonics sees broad applications for its cutting-edge PARS technology. In part, this is because of the subscription-based model the company is developing on Azure. “There’s value in building on the solid foundations and strong business fundamentals that Microsoft delivers for rapidly growing technology companies like ours,” says Dr. Haji Reza. “Soon, we won’t be building individual systems for each PARS system that we create for our customers—we’ll allocate the storage, image libraries, and processing power they require directly from Azure.”

The simple process of changing the images that are fed into PARS-connected web apps in Azure enables the rapid creation of new clinical studies in a variety of medical science areas. “We’ve got a platform technology that, once adopted, is really going to spread out,” says Dr. Haji Reza. “We’ve spoken to a number of interested businesses already, and it could very well be that PARS finds utility well beyond cancer, blood analysis, and eye work and becomes a new tool for people across the scientific world, each of them using it with their own unique apps and datasets.”

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