Naval Undersea Warfare Center Employees Win National Technology Transfer Award
March 13, 2002
The efforts of a NUWC engineer and patent attorney to transfer Navy technology to the commercial sector have been identified by the government’s Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) for Technology Transfer as deserving of the 2002 FLC Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer.
A sailor trying to find mines in a cluttered underwater sonar environment faces the same challenges as a physician in detecting small cancerous lesions in mammograms of dense breast tissue. Both searches can benefit from digital image enhancement. Knowing this, an engineer at the NUWC Newport Division has developed and demonstrated a digital image enhancement that uses wavelets, a method of representing and building images with mathematical functions that serve as building blocks, to represent data. Applying the digital image enhancement allows small objects to be found in a large complex area.
Under a patent license agreement and a three-way Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA), the Division is transferring Navy technology to the medical community. A new small business, Advanced Image Enhancement, Inc. (AIE) of Providence, R.I., has been formed to commercialize the technology. The Slater Center for Interactive Technologies, a nonprofit organization established by the State to foster economic development, provided seed money and business aid to AIE, as well as CRADA funds to the Division, to support the effort.
Breast cancer is a leading cause of cancer death in women, second only to lung cancer. With an estimated 192,000 new breast cancer cases diagnosed by the end of this year and an estimated total of 40,000 lives taken due to breast cancer in 2001 alone, the statistics are staggering. Early detection is key in the survivor rate, however, the reading and interpretation of mammograms is difficult. Small lesions, representing early cancer, are often missed when radiologists examine a patient’s mammogram. This new technology would enhance the physician’s ability to detect these microcalcifications, catching the cancer at an earlier stage than previously possible. This earlier detection would improve the patient’s chance of survival, and allow less invasive treatment options.
As a digital signal-processing expert in the Division’s Submarine Electromagnetic Systems Department, Michael Duarte developed the technology after noting the similarities between minehunting sonar challenges, and the challenges faced by physicians. As a complement to Duarte’s efforts, James Kasischke, NUWC’s Associate Patent Counsel, identified the patent protection avenues available. He also identified a legal framework for the business opportunities and helped draft the agreements used to establish the formal relationships between the Division, AIE, and the Slater Center.
AIE is currently commercializing the technology to make it available to medical facilities. In the short term Digital Image Enhancement holds great promise for early detection of breast cancer. Transferring the digital enhancement technology from the Navy to the medical community represents significant cost savings in development costs, and eventually, will be responsible for saving many lives. Follow-on work by AIE will address the use of the image enhancement in all areas of radiological images.
Without Duarte or Kasischke, the Navy would not have been successful in transferring this technology. For their efforts, the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer (FLC) has selected Duarte and Kasischke to receive a 2002 FLC Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer. The award will be presented at the FLC annual meeting in May in Little Rock, Arkansas.