Cianna Medical announced on Thursday that over 25,000 breast tumor localizations have been performed at 230 U.S. hospitals to date using its SCOUT Radar Localization System.

“This technology can be placed any time prior to surgery,” Jill Anderson, president and CEO of Cianna Medical, told HCB News. “Because you can do that, you can place it at a time that’s most convenient for your patient.”

Conventional systems contain wires that have to be placed the day of surgery, but SCOUT is wireless. Because of that, the tumor can be localized prior to the day of surgery, which significantly shortens the procedure time.

Anderson said that the majority of her customers want to replace their current wire localization approach with this new radar localization approach. In addition to shortening operating time, the wireless method can also reduce the number of secondary surgeries.

SCOUT allows surgeons to target affected tissue within +/-1 millimeter of its location. It can be used for both lumpectomy localization and to mark a biopsy site without causing any significant artifacts on MR images.

“The underlying technology is called micro-impulse radar and it was originally developed for a number of military applications where precision and low power and relatively low costs were important,” said Anderson. “We took that core technology and reinvented it to be used in human tissue.”

SCOUT is FDA approved and was commercially launched in the U.S. market almost two years ago. The company expects to receive CE mark in 2019.

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