EUPHORIA · Enhancing Ultrasound and PHOtoacoustics for Recognition of Intestinal Abnormalities

EUPHORIA will pave the way to establish MSOT (Multispectral Optoacoustic Tomography) technology for the non-invasive assessment of intestinal inflammation in patients. EUPHORIA will enable commercialization of the technology by finalizing technical improvements that will increase diagnostic outcome beyond what has been shown in a first feasibility study, will improve usability, prepare CE marking for the new device and validate clinical results in a large clinical study.Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic condition, posing significant burden to patients and health care systems. Patients suffer from a relapsing course of intestinal inflammation, and to date, there is no satisfying non-invasive diagnostic modality for monitoring disease activity. In a recent clinical study conducted by University Hospital Erlangen, MSOT, a technology developed by iThera Medical (ITM), has proven to be superior in diagnostic performance to other procedures.Imasonic (IMA) and RayFos (RFO) are ideally positioned to drive the technical improvement steps: Imasonic, an expert in ultrasound transducer manufacturing, will develop an ultrasound detector with higher signal-to-noise ratio to enable better sensitivity and detection at depth. RayFos specializes on real-time sensing and image inversion, processing and rendering and has significant experience in optoacoustic tomography algorithms and implementation. iThera Medical will lead the incorporation into the device, CE marking and commercialization. The University Hospital Erlangen is an excellence center in IBD and will drive the clinical validation. Pintail has extensive project management, dissemination and commercialization expertise.