Ultrasound that doesn’t require touching sufferers. An internet-based device that reinvents crew scheduling for the Air Force. Cryptographic {hardware} that protects delicate knowledge. And the world’s first sensible reminiscence for quantum networking.
These 4 applied sciences developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, both wholly or with collaborators, acquired 2023 R&D 100 Awards. The ultrasound know-how additionally acquired a second award in a particular class recognizing market-disrupting merchandise. Bestowed by R&D World journal, the awards acknowledge the 100 most vital improvements which have transitioned to make use of or been made out there on the market or license prior to now 12 months. The worldwide competitors is judged by a panel of science and know-how consultants and business professionals.
“Lincoln Laboratory has been very fortunate to receive 86 R&D 100 Awards over the past 14 years. Our rate of unclassified technology transition continues to be very high, and we have a similar high transition rate for our classified programs. The laboratory is truly changing the world through its successful technology development and transition. We congratulate everyone involved,” says Lincoln Laboratory Director Eric Evans.
Medical imaging with noncontact ultrasound
Many persons are acquainted with the ultrasound course of — a sonographer presses a transducer onto a affected person’s pores and skin and strikes it round, gathering pictures of tissues and organs. Though a well-established know-how, ultrasound suffers from sonographer variability, making it troublesome to precisely examine repeat measurements, and is restricted by the necessity to make contact with the pores and skin. For these causes, magnetic resonance imaging and computerized tomography, regardless of their excessive prices and lack of portability, are nonetheless the predominant imaging applied sciences for illness monitoring.
The Noncontact Laser Ultrasound (NCLUS) for Medical Imaging overcomes these limitations. The skin-safe laser system acquires ultrasound pictures with out touching a affected person. It makes use of a pulsed laser that emits optical vitality, which is transformed to ultrasound waves upon hitting tissue. The returning echoes are detected by a laser Doppler vibrometer and are processed to generate pictures. The system’s laser positioning on the physique may be precisely reproduced, thus eliminating variability throughout repeated scans. This repeatability might allow ultrasound for use to trace illness development, comparable to adjustments in tumor dimension over time.
Its touchless design additionally opens up fully new makes use of for ultrasound: “NCLUS might picture burn or trauma victims, sufferers with open deep-tissue areas straight throughout surgical procedure, untimely infants requiring intensive medical care, sufferers with neck and backbone accidents, and contagious people from standoff distances,” says Robert Haupt, NCLUS co-inventor.
With NCLUS, medical employees with out sonography coaching would possibly be capable of carry out ultrasound imaging exterior of a hospital — in a health care provider’s workplace, at dwelling, or in a distant battlefield setting. Because of its game-changing potential within the medical imaging business, NCLUS additionally acquired the R&D 100 Silver Medal within the Special Recognition: Market Disruptor Products class, along with the R&D 100 Award.
Both awards are shared with the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Ultrasound Research and Translation and Sound & Bright LLC.
An optimizer for aircrew scheduling
The U.S. Air Force has intense scheduling wants. Its fleet of C-17s, the cargo plane that transports troops and provides globally, marked 4 million flight hours final 12 months. Until not too long ago, Air Force airmen, comparable to pilots and loadmasters, must schedule every flight’s crew manually, on a whiteboard.
Puckboard has modified that. The web-based utility gives clever, training-informed scheduling for the primary time since army flight scheduling started about 80 years in the past, and is returning worthwhile time again to airmen to concentrate on their main duties.
Puckboard’s collaborative instruments present schedulers with project suggestions whereas permitting crew members to volunteer for occasions that work greatest for his or her private lives. Beyond offering a digital calendaring perform, Puckboard applies synthetic intelligence methods that take into account metrics comparable to crew coaching development, flight-hour distribution, overqualification avoidance, and project fragility to suggest optimum schedules. Today, Puckboard hosts 24,000 customers and has scheduled greater than 315,000 occasions throughout 87 squadrons.
“Puckboard’s impact is a direct reflection of the breadth and depth of skill sets and sincere passion that all the contributors have. From the designers, software engineers, and algorithm experts to the active-duty squadrons and aircrew members, all the way up to senior leadership — everyone is committed to increasing the readiness of the U.S. Air Force through the lens of improving the quality of life of our airmen,” says Michael Snyder, a principal investigator on the undertaking. “Scheduling is a complex topic, made even more difficult under uncertainty, and this effort is a testament to being able to solve any problem with the proper team.”
This R&D 100 Award is shared with MIT, RevaComm, Department of the Air Force – MIT AI Accelerator, Air Force fifteenth Wing, sixtieth Air Mobility Wing, 437th Airlift Wing, Headquarters Air Mobility Command, Air Force Research Laboratory, assistant secretary of the Air Force (Installations, Environment, and Energy), and Raytheon-BBN.
A tool to safe knowledge on uncrewed platforms
For the U.S. army, using uncrewed methods is rising to attenuate hurt to human operators. Because these methods typically transmit delicate knowledge over the air, their radio parts have to be licensed by the National Security Agency (NSA). For years, this certification course of has been an insurmountable hurdle for a lot of small companies and would-be innovators in radio know-how and robotics from which the army may benefit. Now, such builders can use an already-NSA licensed safety answer, developed by Lincoln Laboratory, that’s able to drop in and deploy for all kinds of automobiles and missions.
The Security/Cyber Module (SCM) End Cryptographic Unit (ECU) is a compact gadget that secures tactical datalinks of uncrewed methods. The module modernizes safety by pulling collectively a number of cybersecurity applied sciences, most notably a way known as Tactical Key Management that establishes secret keys on the fly for safe communication. The module is the primary crypto gadget designed for a broad swath of uncrewed methods throughout the Joint Communication Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JCAUS), a current U.S. Department of Defense effort to modularize uncrewed system radio hyperlinks and permit reuse of NSA-certified parts by standardizing capabilities and interfaces.
Since its supply, the U.S. Navy has awarded a full-rate manufacturing contract to Tomahawk Robotics to produce SCM ECUs to be used of their explosive ordnance disposal robots. “While developed primarily for Navy ground robotics, the SCM/ECU’s adherence to JCAUS ensures that it is well-suited to airborne and underwater vehicles alike,” says Ben Nahill, a principal investigator on this system.
The award is shared with the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific.
A scalable, photonic reminiscence for quantum networking
In quantum info processing, reminiscence receives and shops the state of a quantum bit (qubit), much like how reminiscence for an bizarre communication system or laptop receives and shops info as binary states. Memory makes it attainable to reliably ship and obtain info between separate methods, even throughout lossy transmission hyperlinks. Lincoln Laboratory’s quantum reminiscence is the primary to mix, in a single module, the three capabilities required for networking collectively separate quantum methods: a photonic interface, a option to appropriate for loss errors, and an structure scalable to tens of recollections in a single module. Until now, quantum reminiscence methods have fallen brief on a number of of those capabilities.
“This module eliminates many of the barriers to deploying quantum memories into real-world settings and test beds and to actually using them to develop emerging advanced quantum applications, such as distributed sensing and networked quantum processing,” says Ben Dixon, who leads this work.
A photonic interface permits for qubits to be transferred through particles of sunshine (photons) between the reminiscence and optical-fiber networks. The laboratory’s quantum reminiscence makes use of silicon-vacancy (SiV) diamond color-centers, that are atom-like buildings that may be effectively manipulated with mild, even on the single photon degree. This SiV know-how may appropriate for signal-loss errors ensuing from inefficient and lossy community hyperlinks. Because it makes use of particular person atomic color-centers, this know-how is appropriate with environment friendly “heralded” protocols, the place a sign confirms the profitable transmission of a photon throughout the community and storage of the related qubit in reminiscence.
The SiV module can also be scalable. The SiV reminiscence cells are built-in to a custom-made photonic built-in circuit, a know-how that permits sending and receiving alerts and may be scaled to a whole bunch of parallel channels. Combining this integration method with a singular packaging structure, laboratory researchers built-in eight quantum recollections right into a single module. Additional recollections may be built-in into this single module, which may be joined with further modules for additional scalability.
In addition to those profitable applied sciences, 5 different Lincoln Laboratory applied sciences have been named R&D 100 award finalists. A gala celebrating the 2023 award winners might be held on Nov. 16 in San Diego, California.