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Phase Wave: Our Novel & Interdisciplinary Approach

Possible now due to silicon advances from the steady march of Moore's Law + slipstreaming on LiDAR and AR/VR advances

  • Not only intensity of light & sound

  • Use phase of waves via interference

  • More Information & better pinpointing

  • Enabled by new chip manufacturing processes

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Phase Wave: Interference

  • Moore’s Law gives us wavelength sized pixels on $1 camera chips

  • We invented a diode laser that enables us to record interference patterns as shown to the left

  • We use math to find where the light has been like a sailor can read interfering waves on the ocean.

  • Using phase wave, we read features of the brain that haven’t been possible to read before – like blood flow throughout the brain.  No one has done that before.  We are doing that and more.

Phase Wave: Delays enable beam focus & steering

  • We can focus and steer waves anywhere in the brain to treat the disease where it is in the brain noninvasively. We craft the shape of waves as they spread out.

  • We do this by using an array of emitters shown in yellow here. 

  • They all emit exactly the same wavelength, but the wave is delayed slightly from one emitter to the next. 

  • The result shows how we can focus or spread the beam anywhere.  We can use the same principle to even steer the beam right or left or up or down to anywhere in the brain we need to treat. 

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Phase Wave: Harmonic Excitation

  • A wine glass has a resonant frequency & is brittle. 

  • Certain sound frequencies first vibrate and then shatter it while nothing else in the room is damaged. 

  • Akin to this: aggressive cancer cells have mechanical differences that might allow us to treat and kill just the cancer cells and not disturb the healthy tissue. 

  • Why: Most all aggressive cancer cells have hard, brittle cell membranes, unlike the rest of the brain and body tissue that grows slowly and has great flexibility.  

  • Diagnostic-intensity-level ultrasound resonant frequencies destroy cancer cells or excite neurons

Openwater is using our phase wave principles to build next-generation portable neural diagnostic and therapeutic systems. 

 

We are working to enable early precision stroke detection & routing + neuro therapeutics for mental & neurodegenerative diseases and agressive cancer therapy  which could save hundreds of millions of lives

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  • Here we examine a blood vessel

    • When the blood is moving the light ricochets differently over a camera frame time & it blurs out the patterns on the camera chip - making them low contrast. 

    • By decoding the blur -  and the contrast  - we can get the speed of blood flow and see if the blood flow has stopped - like in a stroke. 

Phase Wave Application 1 : Seeing Blood Flow throughout the brain

  • Our device - shown in purple – emits laser light that spreads and scatters through the brain.

  • The camera chip in the module only sees light that passes through this arc - bouncing and scattering through the skin, skull and brain in the shape of a banana.  We record the interference of these scattering waves on the camera chip as shown above.

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Technology that can scale

Openwater’s proprietary blood flow technology may be able to be applied to critical issues beyond stroke. Our technologies targeting both diagnostic and therapeutic applications have the potential to change the way we approach patient care.

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Phase Wave Application 2 : Killing Cancer Cells + Neurostimulation for Mental & Neurodegenerative Diseases

  • Glioblastoma Cancer Cells Hide Amid the Neurons
    Making it a death sentence – can’t remove one with out the other

  • These cancer cells - like most all aggressive cancers - have mechanical differences that might allow us to treat and kill just the cancer cells and not disturb the healthy tissue.  Why: Most all aggressive cancer cells have hard, brittle cell membranes, unlike the rest of the brain and body tissue that grows slowly and has great flexibility.  

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  • Using an array of low frequency, low intensity ultrasound emitters - like we showed a few slides back - we can safely spread the ultrasound waves through the brain. 

  • The ultrasound is at lower intensity than the ultrasound used on most pregnant women & their fetuses for the last 50 years. 

  • But … the cancer cells can’t take it.

  • They compress and expand when bathed in ultrasound at a frequency tuned to their size and mechanical properties.

  • Until the Cancer Cells Burst
    Releasing proteins that spread out and could help vaccinate the brain against cancer

  • This has the potential to treat most all aggressive cancers - as they mostly have brittle cell membranes. 

  • We are in preclinical on this using living organoid brains in petri dishes to optimize the frequencies, intensities and pulse sequences to try to destroy the cancer without harming the healthy tissue. 

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Profound Implications for Neurostimulation inMental & Neurodegenerative Diseases

  • Neurons Under Harmonic Excitation Can Release Neurotransmitters

  • Could unlock similar mechanism of exciting (or inhibiting) the neuron.

  • Key for depression and other mental disease.

  • Via different harmonic frequencies & pulse trains could enable neuro- and synapto- growth for Alzheimer’s and other neuro-degenerative disease.

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