Ultrasound that doesn’t require touching patients. An online-based tool that reinvents crew scheduling for the Air Force. Cryptographic hardware that protects sensitive data. And the world’s first practical memory for quantum networking.
These 4 technologies developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, either wholly or with collaborators, received 2023 R&D 100 Awards. The ultrasound technology also received a second award in a special category recognizing market-disrupting products. Bestowed by magazine, the awards recognize the 100 most vital innovations which have transitioned to make use of or been made available on the market or license previously yr. The worldwide competition is judged by a panel of science and technology experts and industry 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 now have an analogous high transition rate for our classified programs. The laboratory is really 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 individuals are aware of the ultrasound process — a sonographer presses a transducer onto a patient’s skin and moves it around, gathering images of tissues and organs. Though a well-established technology, ultrasound suffers from sonographer variability, making it difficult to accurately compare repeat measurements, and is proscribed by the necessity to make contact with the skin. For these reasons, magnetic resonance imaging and computerized tomography, despite their high costs and lack of portability, are still the predominant imaging technologies for disease tracking.
The Noncontact Laser Ultrasound (NCLUS) for Medical Imaging overcomes these limitations. The skin-safe laser system acquires ultrasound images without touching a patient. It uses a pulsed laser that emits optical energy, which is converted to ultrasound waves upon hitting tissue. The returning echoes are detected by a laser Doppler vibrometer and are processed to generate images. The system’s laser positioning on the body may be accurately reproduced, thus eliminating variability across repeated scans. This repeatability could enable ultrasound for use to trace disease progression, akin to changes in tumor size over time.
Its touchless design also opens up entirely latest uses for ultrasound: “NCLUS could image burn or trauma victims, patients with open deep-tissue regions directly during surgery, premature infants requiring intensive medical care, patients with neck and spine injuries, and contagious individuals from standoff distances,” says Robert Haupt, NCLUS co-inventor.
With NCLUS, medical staff without sonography training might have the ability to perform ultrasound imaging outside of a hospital — in a physician’s office, at home, or in a distant battlefield setting. Due to its game-changing potential within the medical imaging industry, NCLUS also received the R&D 100 Silver Medal within the Special Recognition: Market Disruptor Products category, along with the R&D 100 Award.
Each awards are shared with the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Ultrasound Research and Translation and Sound & Brilliant LLC.
An optimizer for aircrew scheduling
The U.S. Air Force has intense scheduling needs. Its fleet of C-17s, the cargo aircraft that transports troops and supplies globally, marked 4 million flight hours last yr. Until recently, Air Force airmen, akin to pilots and loadmasters, would must schedule each flight’s crew manually, on a whiteboard.
Puckboard has modified that. The online-based application provides intelligent, training-informed scheduling for the primary time since military flight scheduling began about 80 years ago, and is returning useful time back to airmen to concentrate on their primary duties.
Puckboard’s collaborative tools provide schedulers with project recommendations while allowing crew members to volunteer for events that work best for his or her personal lives. Beyond providing a digital calendaring function, Puckboard applies artificial intelligence techniques that consider metrics akin to crew training progression, flight-hour distribution, overqualification avoidance, and project fragility to recommend optimal schedules. Today, Puckboard hosts 24,000 users and has scheduled greater than 315,000 events across 87 squadrons.
“Puckboard’s impact is a direct reflection of the breadth and depth of skill sets and sincere passion that every one the contributors have. From the designers, software engineers, and algorithm experts to the active-duty squadrons and aircrew members, all the best way as much as senior leadership — everyone seems to be committed to increasing the readiness of the U.S. Air Force through the lens of improving the standard of lifetime of our airmen,” says Michael Snyder, a principal investigator on the project. “Scheduling is a posh topic, made even tougher under uncertainty, and this effort is a testament to having the ability to solve any problem with the right 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 secure data on uncrewed platforms
For the U.S. military, using uncrewed systems is growing to attenuate harm to human operators. Because these systems often transmit sensitive data over the air, their radio components should be certified by the National Security Agency (NSA). For years, this certification process has been an insurmountable hurdle for a lot of small businesses and would-be innovators in radio technology and robotics from which the military may gain advantage. Now, such developers can use an already-NSA certified security solution, developed by Lincoln Laboratory, that’s able to drop in and deploy for a wide selection of vehicles and missions.
The Security/Cyber Module (SCM) End Cryptographic Unit (ECU) is a compact device that secures tactical datalinks of uncrewed systems. The module modernizes security by pulling together multiple cybersecurity technologies, most notably a way called Tactical Key Management that establishes secret keys on the fly for secure communication. The module is the primary crypto device designed for a broad swath of uncrewed systems throughout the Joint Communication Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JCAUS), a recent U.S. Department of Defense effort to modularize uncrewed system radio links and permit reuse of NSA-certified components by standardizing capabilities and interfaces.
Since its delivery, the U.S. Navy has awarded a full-rate production 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’s 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 memory for quantum networking
In quantum information processing, memory receives and stores the state of a quantum bit (qubit), much like how memory for an bizarre communication system or computer receives and stores information as binary states. Memory makes it possible to reliably send and receive information between separate systems, even across lossy transmission links. Lincoln Laboratory’s quantum memory is the primary to mix, in a single module, the three capabilities required for networking together separate quantum systems: a photonic interface, a solution to correct for loss errors, and an architecture scalable to tens of memories in a single module. Until now, quantum memory systems have fallen short on a number of of those capabilities.
“This module eliminates lots of the barriers to deploying quantum memories into real-world settings and test beds and to really using them to develop emerging advanced quantum applications, akin to distributed sensing and networked quantum processing,” says Ben Dixon, who leads this work.
A photonic interface allows for qubits to be transferred via particles of sunshine (photons) between the memory and optical-fiber networks. The laboratory’s quantum memory uses silicon-vacancy (SiV) diamond color-centers, that are atom-like structures that may be efficiently manipulated with light, even at the one photon level. This SiV technology also can correct for signal-loss errors resulting from inefficient and lossy network links. Since it makes use of individual atomic color-centers, this technology is compatible with efficient “heralded” protocols, where a signal confirms the successful transmission of a photon across the network and storage of the associated qubit in memory.
The SiV module can also be scalable. The SiV memory cells are integrated to a custom-made photonic integrated circuit, a technology that allows sending and receiving signals and may be scaled to a whole bunch of parallel channels. Combining this integration approach with a novel packaging architecture, laboratory researchers integrated eight quantum memories right into a single module. Additional memories may be integrated into this single module, which may be joined with additional modules for further scalability.
Along with these winning technologies, five other Lincoln Laboratory technologies were named R&D 100 award finalists. A gala celebrating the 2023 award winners will likely be held on Nov. 16 in San Diego, California.