Optical ultrasound for lung-cancer diagnosis
2026 · Technical lead · UCL Engineering
The brief
Make the business case for a miniature optical ultrasound probe that would guide bronchoscopy in early lung-cancer diagnosis. The technology came from the MISI group and was still pre-clinical, with no revenue.
What I did
I led the technical side of the case.
- Market. I started from about 319,000 lung-cancer diagnoses and 1.5 million bronchoscopies a year in Europe. I narrowed that to the patients the device could realistically serve using clinical incidence data: the 26% of cancers in the lower lobe or bronchus, then a filter by stage.
- Competitors. I compared radial and linear EBUS, CT-guided biopsy and robotic bronchoscopy platforms (Ion, Monarch) on clinical performance and on IP. The main competitors are already patented, and our concept had no IP of its own yet.
- Regulation. I mapped the route to a CE mark as a Class IIa device (6–14 months), and assessed the technology at TRL 3.
Result
Working through the risks, I identified fibre breakage, coating delamination and heating from friction at tight bends as the main mechanical unknowns. These could only be resolved experimentally, and quantifying them became the basis of my Research Ignition Award project: the fibre characterisation campaign.