Shares in Feedback plc (LON:FDBK) shot up 17% on Wednesday on news it had received its first order from GE Healthcare for TexRAD, its image texture technology.
The contract is the first from a distribution agreement signed in April with the American diagnostics giant.
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The end user will be the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education & Research, Chandigarh, India.
Feedback business development director, Dr Balaji Ganeshan, called the deal an “important milestone”.
“That one of India's leading medical institutions has selected TexRAD against other image analysis candidates is a strong endorsement of our technology," he added.
TexRAD was the brainchild of Ganeshan, an expert on textural analysis of images gleaned from computed tomography (CT) scans.
Smart piece of software
Distilled down to the basics, it is essentially a very smart piece of software that analyses medical images to reveal features that are not always evident to the human eye.
In doing so, it may “in a very statistical, objective and numerical way relate the output to a prognosis for the patient”, chairman Dr Alastair Riddell told Proactive recently.
Feedback is already making money from TexRAD with sales to institutions carrying out research, but the promised land is filled with sales to hospitals.
Feedback Medical Limited has self-certified TexRAD Lung as a Class I Medical Device, in compliance with the requirements of the EU Medical Device Directive, meaning TexRAD Lung is a Medical Device CE marked for use in the EU. This will enable Feedback to lend numerical support to the very skilled, interpretative work carried out by radiologists.
Meanwhile, a tie-up with a company in Poland called Future Processing provides Feedback with the coding know-how to develop a wider product suite.
Demand for product
Sales of the current product, though modest, reveal there is demand from a very specialist audience in the research sphere.
It means the technology is being cited in the literature by some of the leading centres for cancer research – providing a great endorsement of the TexRAD from key opinion leaders.
In fact, the technology is also starting to make an impression with businesses operating in the field.
The stock advanced 0.3p to 2.10p.
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