DMBN: The economist Tyler Cowen recently published a book ("The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better") arguing, that the world economy is in trouble, in part because innovation has plateaued, as all the low-hanging technological fruit has been picked by scientists over the last 200 to 300 years. Do you see this applying to health care? I know the last truly new modality - the Biograph mMR - which Siemens released earlier this year, is one of the first ones to come out in almost a decade.

Sorensen: Certainly we're very closely watching to see if there's another diagnostic imaging tool that can surpass what the current imaging tools do. I would say I don't really subscribe to the economist's theory for a couple of reasons. If you look at what CT scanners do today versus what they did 10 years ago, it's a completely different thing. I would say the same with routine MRI. The kinds of images we get on a high-end 3-T are just light-years away from what we got on a high-end 1.5-T system 10 years ago, whether it's parallel imaging, or whether it's the contrast agents, or whether it's echo-planar imaging that's now widely available, or fMRI and diffusion, and these are all tools that, 10 years ago, people were just struggling to actually get working routinely, and now they're everywhere. So, of course it looks like we took all the low-hanging fruit. If there was low hanging fruit up, we'd go take it. But I think people are quite inventive, and if you look at the history of innovation even in the last 5 or 10 years, it's quite remarkable. Is there another technology like MRI or CT out there that's going to have such an impact? I don't see one right now. We're certainly watching, looking for it. But I don't see anything like that in the future.

DMBN: How do you feel about magnetic particle imaging?

Sorensen: I don't think MPI is as breakthrough as we'd like it to be. It's interesting, but when you have to put particles into people, that already puts you in a different regime.

DMBN: Can you think off the top of your head what the next really promising modality might be?

Sorensen: Certainly, for more than two decades everyone has been carefully watching optical imaging - infrared in particular -- because it can penetrate the body. There are some clinical trials going on, especially in the breast, for looking at optical imaging. It's got some strengths, it has some real mathematical challenges, and frankly, some commercialization challenges. The intellectual property landscape is quite a mess in optical imaging, and the killer app hasn't really emerged to help consolidate that. And frankly, it doesn't win on spatial resolution, it doesn't win on chemical resolution. It really wins on cost. And that's hard to get excited about, when the cost of other tools keeps going down. The key for any of these innovations is doing something you just can't do in any other way, not just doing it less expensively or somehow in a more friendly way. And that's what we're still looking for.

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