Resounding Success

Originally Published MX January/February 2006

COVER STORY

Interview by Steve Halasey

Medical device executives continually strive to identify new technologies with clinical value and untapped market potential. When they succeed, the result can be a set of market-changing products that offer significant benefits to healthcare professionals and their patients. Sometimes those products even constitute a solid foundation for an entirely new company.

That's certainly been the case for SonoSite Inc. (Bothell, WA), the company that pioneered the development of hand-carried ultrasound devices for clinical applications and has taken a leadership role in developing the markets for such devices. SonoSite's systems rely heavily on advances in application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) that were initiated during the 1980s and 1990s by its parent company, ATL Ultrasound. In the early 1990s, when ATL became the industry leader in using ASIC technology to drive ultrasound systems, the company began to investigate the possibility of condensing large, cart-based systems into smaller units.