by Thomas MacMillan | Mar 7, 2011 12:19 pm

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Posted to: Business/ Economic Development, Science/ Medical, Newhallville

Years ago, self-taught inventor Fitz Walker rescued souped up discarded PCs and linked them together into a super-computer in his garage. Using technology from NASA, he developed an invention that could revolutionize medical imaging and bring manufacturing jobs to Newhallville—if he can find investors to back it.

Walker is the inventor of MED-SEG, an imaging system that enhances the information already present in traditional radiology images, like MRIs, CT scans, and PET scan. The technology could reduce false positives in mammograms by 80 percent, said Walker’s wife Jennifer Walker, who runs the business side of Bartron, their company..

MED-SEG won Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval last year, which means the Walkers can start selling the system to hospitals. But first they need to build a manufacturing facility to the exacting standards required by regulators of medical equipment. With $500,000 they could build such a facility and create 20 new manufacturing jobs on Shelton Avenue, Jennifer said.

The Walkers are working with the Economic Development Corporation to try to find investors. On Friday they met with a doctor in the department of diagnostic radiology at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Fitz said the meeting went well. It’s the first step in a process he said he’s hoping will lead to a clinical trial of MED-SEG at the hospital, which would open the door to investors.

“This could be the turning point,” Jennifer said about the potential Yale partnership. ”If it’s in Yale then everyone else will want to have it.”

NASA Technology At Work

Fitz, who’s 60, offered a tour of his lab on the second floor of the New Haven Business Center on Shelton Avenue. Wearing two-tone Reeboks, khaki cargo pants, and fleece pullover emblazoned with Hewlett-Packard logo, Fitz pointed out several generations of MED-SEG systems set up in different corners of the lab’s main room, from yellowing old computer monitors to huge flat-panel displays.

In a small room nearby, banks of computers blinked and whirred while a huge fan on the floor ensured they don’t overheat. Those computers are part of the cloud, the remote data processing and storage that makes MED-SEG different from other types of medical imaging.

“Everything we do is in the cloud,” Walker said. “What we’re doing is giving you access to a supercomputer.”

He explained how the system works:

A radiologist feeds a traditional medical image, like a mammogram, into a MED-SEG terminal at his or her hospital. The digital mammogram image is sent over the internet to the cloud, where it’s processed by the Bartron supercomputer. The MED-SEG software running on the supercomputer creates an image that can be analyzed to display information otherwise invisible to the naked eye. The radiologist, using a MED-SEG terminal, can fine tune the information to highlight specific areas of certain density, to show anomalies previously undetected.

The system is based on technology developed by NASA for the geological analysis of satellite images and represents a decade of work, said Jennifer.

It all started in early 2000 when the Walkers attended a one-day NASA workshop in D.C. Fitz heard about technology developed by a man named Jim Tilton and decided he could use it for medical imaging. He pitched the idea to NASA and won permission to work with the software, beginning the years of work that led to MED-SEG. (Click play to watch a NASA video on Fitz’s adaptation of the NASA technology.)

“You have to literally tear the code apart and put it back together,” Fitz said.

Fitz dived into the project, combining his backgrounds in computer science and medical illustration. Fitz’s resume includes some interesting lines. He’s taught “Afro-American sculpture” at the University of Massachusetts; he taught computer aided drafting at Eli Whitney for 13 years. He is a jazz clarinetist and has done fish illustrations for Audubon guides. He’s studied electro-mechanical engineering and computer science, although he dropped out and taught himself because the class was too slow.

Fitz worked briefly on MED-SEG from a space in Science Park, then moved into his garage and basement at his home on Blake Street to work on the project. There he built his own supercomputer from scavenged PC towers linked to work together. He and his computer scientist friends would pick up old computers, crack them open and soup them up to run faster by “overclocking” them. They stacked the towers on racks in the basement, where they had to keep an eye on them to make sure they weren’t burning out.

Eventually, it got to be too much for Jennifer; she kicked the experiment out of the house. The monthly electricity bill, which had been up to $900, suddenly dropped, prompting a confused call from United Illuminating.

Since moving in 2004 to New Haven Business Center, a sprawling former factory complex that now includes a climbing gym, Fitz has been honing the technology, and upgrading to more and more powerful computers. A stack of the old towers remains in the lab, but they’ve been replaced by up-to-date processors.

MED-SEG is currently in use at the University of Connecticut School of Dental Medicine, where a clinical study has shown that the system improves the detection of osteoporosis in the jaw.

Bartron is poised to expand to other hospitals, but new medical technology has a high regulatory threshold. The company needs to prepare a fully compliant new manufacturing facility and meet a host of government requirements before it can take MED-SEG to the masses.

In the meantime, the company is running low on money. Jennifer said they recently had to lay off four or five people, reducing the number of full-time staff to just three, including both Walkers.

“Our backs are up against the wall,” she said. With funding, they could hire back their staff and hire even more people to start assembling MED-SEG terminals. All they need is $500,000, Jennifer said.

“It’s nothing! To me, that’s peanuts for what we’re bringing to the table,” she said. “This could be a revolution in the medical industry.”

“It’s the very beginning of cloud-based medical imaging” combined with advanced data mining, Fitz said.

One of the best features of the system is that it’s inexpensive, which means better diagnoses for all not just those people who can afford it, Fitz said. It’s only fair, since the technology was developed by NASA with taxpayer dolllars, he said. “That’s really what it’s all about to me.”