Advances in semiconductor technology have enabled revolutionary advances in medical devices and instrumentation across the board, allowing increased speed and reliability and reduction in size and power consumption. Sophisticated integrated circuit design tools and component libraries facilitate rapid design and simulation. However, these very advantages, which appear to offer myriad opportunities for innovation, may also inadvertently blind us to the full range of innovative possibilities in medical electronics and systems. Medical IC design, particularly for key-pathway components, must periodically return to and consider the underlying physics as well as the systems-level approach. This talk will include examples from medical ultrasound imaging and discuss challenges and opportunities presented by other imaging modality such as computed tomography.
Alice Chiang is Chairman and CEO of Teratech Corporation; the company she founded in 1994. At Teratech, Dr. Chiang uses her years of scientific experience and research to implement and develop system-on-chip technology resulting in the launch of the Terason Ultrasound System in 1999, a portable, microminiaturized, PC-based ultrasound system that provides excellent image quality while being much smaller in size and lower in power than conventional systems. The Terason system currently is being used in medical settings world-wide. Dr. Chiang is an IEEE Fellow, she holds a PhD in Physics from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Her honors include being named to the 2007 Top Woman-Led Business in Massachusetts, the 2007 Frost & Sullivan Technology Innovation Award, the 2001 Frost & Sullivan Entrepreneurial Company Market Engineering Award and the 1986 DARPA Outstanding Technology Breakthrough Award.