NEWS 3
BCIT Planetarium gets facelift
CITY 5
Man arrested for drug dealing
ARTS 11
5
Talk series at SFU Gallery
THINGS TO DO THIS WEEKEND FRIDAY FEBRUARY 3, 2017
SEE PAGE 20
There’s more at Burnabynow.com
LOCAL NEWS – LOCAL MATTERS
An inside job
NOW, THAT’S A SELFIE:
By Cornelia Naylor
Clarius Mobile Health founder and CEO Laurent Pelissier holds one of his Burnaby-based company’s C3 handheld ultrasound scanners, which won Health Canada and U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval in December for use by medical professionals.
cnaylor@burnabynow.com
EXCLUSIVE After knowing him for only a few minutes, Clarius Mobile Health CEO Laurent Pelissier shows me parts of himself I’ve never seen in any other man. Using his Burnaby company’s new handheld C3 ultrasound scanner and his iPhone, the 45-year-old entrepreneurial electrical engineer lets me peer at his liver, one of his kidneys, his gall bladder and his diaphragm. Slipping the scanner under his shirt, Pelissier slides it around on his abdomen, and writhing black and white images appear on his cell phone in real time via the Clarius app. “That’s my liver,” he says, zooming in and out with the phone’s touch screen much like you would a Facebook photo. “The grey is my liver and then the vessels are showing black because blood doesn’t reflect ultrasound … If I keep going you can see my kidney.” The device, approved in De-
PHOTO CORNELIA NAYLOR
cember by Health Canada and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use by medical professionals, is a first of its kind, and Laurent expects it to become as ubiquitous as the stethoscope someday. SIZE MATTERS The use of portable ultrasound scanners in so-called point-of-care
settings, like doctors’ offices and emergency rooms, has become increasingly popular for things like guiding injections and scanning quickly for internal bleeding. But even the portable devices now in use are still at least the size of a laptop computer and require doctors to mess around with cords, buttons and toggles to get
usable images, Pelissier says. Clarius scanners, meanwhile, are cordless and fit in the palm of your hand. “We took the whole ultrasound machine and put it onto one chip and this chip we put it inside the scanner,” Pelissier says, “and for interfacing – like controlling and viewing images in real time – we
use smartphones or tablets,” Billed as the world’s first pointand-shoot ultrasound scanners, the Clarius machines have also been engineered to optimize images automatically for clinicians. “At point-of-care, what doctors need is an ultrasound that they Continued on page 4
OWNER ADVOCATES FOR HIS PIT BULL
Diesel deserves some freedom in his own yard By Tereza Verenca
tverenca@burnabynow.com
A Burnaby family wants the city to tweak part of the animal control bylaw that’s responsible for regulating
pit bulls. At Monday night’s council meeting, Ram Bansal shared how he was recently fined for having his American pit bull, Diesel, out in his yard.
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Under the current bylaw, pit bulls are considered a “vicious dog” and must be muzzled and kept on a leash when in public. Otherwise, owners must “securely confine” them
either inside or within a fenced yard that is: capable of preventing inadvertent entry by any person, including a child; adequately constructed to prevent the dog from escaping or inflict-
ing harm on any person or domestic animal; and has a sign posted at each point of entry advising that a vicious dog is within. Bansal made the case to council that his yard is
fenced, and that Diesel, who he described as lovable dog that has never hurt anyone, should be able to roam free. “In the court of law, you Continued on page 8
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