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The entire ultrasound imaging device is about a millimeter in diameter. By the way, it's also disposable. You use it once, you throw it away. This thing costs virtually nothing to produce. It makes pictures such as this. You can't, in this light you can't see it very well, but you see that little guy right there? That's bad. So if you were watching this in real time—I didn't bring movies—you would see this thing flapping in the breeze as the bloodflow is going by. Not a good thing, okay? However, you can then perform an intervention and look exactly back at this cross-sectional plane through the artery, and you can then derive a procedure based on that. Cool stuff, right? Some problems, though. We've translated this technology into the clinic, and now it's about a $300 million-a-year business, and EndoSonics, which is now called Volcano Therapeutics, is about $100 million of that. The predictions were that this was to be a several billion-dollar-a-year business. Worldwide, this technology is used on only 10 percent of interventional procedures. Why? Well, it requires an extra device. To get that catheter in, you know, you gotta stick another catheter in there. If you ever been in a cath lab, it's like clockwork. You stick in a device, so to stick another device in means you have to take the old one out. So somebody's in there, you know, there's this person on the table and you're going through their leg and there's five people around, and you start shoving a device in and you pull another device out and you stick your device in to image and pull that out. You stick the device back to do the intervention, and even though the reason it was adopted in 10 percent was because it was proven to significantly change outcomes, it was so damn hard to use that people would only use it for the most difficult cases, so that was 10 percent. It increased procedure time because they're pulling in, pulling out, and all that. Time is money in this ward, and that's added expense in addition to the expense of the device itself. |
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