December 9, 2009

Waterloo Record:  Medical imaging firm raises $1.5M in share offering

WATERLOO — T-Ray Science Inc., a high-tech firm launched out of research at the University of Waterloo, is now a publicly traded company.

The company, which is developing medical imaging products using terahertz radiation, raised $1.5 million in an initial public offering of shares on the TSX Venture Exchange.

T-Ray is the first local company to go public since shares of Sandvine Corp. starting trading on the London and Toronto stock exchanges in 2006.

Led by a trio of young scientists from Iran, the company is working on an imaging device that will aid in the detection of skin cancer. It is also developing a pill analyzer and has manufactured and sold terahertz chips to universities and laboratories.

Link to the full article: http://news.therecord.com/article/641967

October 10, 2009

Waterloo Record:  Waterloo firm’s product may aid skin cancer detection

WATERLOO — Thomas Braun tosses modesty out the window when he talks about his company’s new technology.

“It’s going to change the world we live in, not unlike the X-ray did,” says the chief executive officer of T-Ray Science Inc.

The small Waterloo startup is working on a portable scanning device which, in its own words, may “revolutionize the way skin cancer is diagnosed and ultimately cured.”

The device uses terahertz radiation, which Braun calls the “last unexplored region of the electromagnetic spectrum.”

Link to the full article: http://news.therecord.com/article/611048

September 29, 2009

IRMMW-THz 2009 in Busan, Korea

Two of our scientists, as well as CEO Thomas Braun, have just returned from IRMMW-THz 2009 in Busan, Korea where the world’s leading THz scientific researchers converged to discuss the technology.  At the conference, our scientists delivered three well-received presentations on:

1.        “Designing a flexible 2K-pixel THz Camera using Compressive Sampling”, where a novel design for a single-detector THz imaging system based on Compressive Sampling (CS) was proposed for a single-pixel 2-D THz camera.  This new design does not need raster scanning of the object in front of the THz beam. A time-efficient and cost effective design was exploited to acquire the CS measurements. As a result, the image acquisition time in the proposed imaging system is only limited to the speed of the THz detector.

2.        “Photoconductive aperture antenna arrays for generation and detection of terahertz radiation”, where the application of T-Ray’s T-Lux^TM Aperture Array photoconductive antennas as the transmitter and the receiver elements in terahertz time domain systems was shown. The radiation properties of the antennas were characterized in terms of the applied dc bias and the optical excitation power, and their superior performance in terms of maximum applicable optical power and the THz bandwidth compared to the conventional photoconductive antennas was discussed.  

3.        “Resonantly Enhanced Terahertz Power Spectrum in Terahertz Photoconductive Antennas”, where the application of T-Ray’s T-Lux^TM Dipole photoconductive antennas as the transmitter and the receiver elements in terahertz time domain systems was discussed, and it was shown that in the case of two identical dipole antennas as the transmitter and the receiver elements, the THz power spectrum is enhanced well beyond the frequency limit of the dipoles due to the resonance between the two antennas and the radiation and detection efficiencies of the antennas are better than the conventional aperture transmitter and dipole receiver arrangement.

In addition, our scientists attended several presentations from other researchers, and had the following to say:

THz imaging, spectroscopy, and sensing were the subject of many research works presented at IRMMW-THz 2009.  Applications in biology, medicine, security, and analysis of historical artifacts seem to be areas of particular interest in the current market. THz sources and detectors were also extensively covered and discussed as about fifty oral papers were presented. Continuous wave (CW) generation and detection also attracted attention, as CW could herald a new age of low cost and portable systems.  Research in this area has been mainly conducted on photodiode emitters and InGaAs-based photomixers, toward fiber coupled and compact systems. Novel detectors, based on 2D electron plasmas in transistor channels, were also presented and show potential for future cost-effective imaging solutions.

Several THz groups have also targeted the design of either Pulse or CW, and Coherent or Incoherent THz Cameras.  Common challenges in designing such a camera include increasing the speed, and developing a real-time imaging system.  Near-field imaging also received some attention.

Finally, in addition to few papers presented on THz Astronomy,  Noble laureate George Smoot described in his plenary talk how imaging of cosmic microwave and THz radiation can shed light on the creation and history of the universe.

The conference was a great success, and we look forward to IRMMW-THz 2010.