15+ YEARS OF ENGINEERING ACROSS THE FIELD
For more than fifteen years, RayFos has contributed to the development of optoacoustic systems, helping transform research-grade technologies into deployable instruments. While software engineering remains our core expertise, our contribution extends across the entire system level, ensuring that software, hardware, and clinical workflow operate as a unified instrument. Our experience spans most major optoacoustic modalities developed to date, including Multispectral Optoacoustic Tomography (MSOT), Raster-Scanning Optoacoustic Mesoscopy (RSOM), hybrid endoscopic and microscopy systems, and non-imaging optoacoustic sensing platforms.
COMPLETE SOFTWARE STACK FOR CLINICAL AND PRECLINICAL DEVICES
Across multiple generations of MSOT systems, and since 2016 across both clinical and preclinical RSOM platforms, RayFos has developed the software powering deployed instruments: acquisition and control, image reconstruction, motion correction for in vivo imaging, 3D visualisation, and the application layers used by clinicians and researchers. In this environment, research code alone is insufficient. Robust software engineering is what enables the transition from laboratory prototype to reliable product. The RSOM platform has been continuously refined and expanded through successive EU-funded projects addressing diverse clinical applications: INNODERM for inflammatory and chronic skin diseases, WINTHER for therapeutic monitoring of local and systemic disease through skin imaging, and OPTOMICS for diabetes and metabolic disease, combining RSOM imaging with genomics and proteomics for next-generation disease monitoring.
HARDWARE ACCELERATED SIGNAL PROCESSING
Where required by the imaging problem, our work extends into FPGA development and VHDL implementation. In the EU-funded EUPHORIA project (Horizon 2020), RayFos delivered the FPGA implementation of the ultrasound reconstruction pipeline used in the clinical study for non-invasive assessment of inflammatory bowel disease. This capability, spanning low-level signal-processing hardware through to full application software, allows us to contribute across the entire optoacoustic technology stack.
MULTI MODAL SYSTEM DESIGN
Optoacoustics is used both as a standalone modality and as part of multi-modal setups in imaging and sensing. When operating alongside complementary imaging modalities, the engineering challenge shifts from individual components to full-system integration. This includes co-registration, spatial and temporal synchronisation, and the unification of heterogeneous acquisition and processing pipelines into a coherent clinical instrument. Through the ESOHISTO and ESOTRAC projects, we integrated optoacoustic imaging with OCT and confocal modalities for real-time oesophageal endoscopy. In DYNAMIC, optoacoustics was combined with adaptive optics for ophthalmic microscopy. These projects required system-level engineering well beyond a single imaging modality.
OPTOACOUSTIC SENSING BEYOND IMAGING
Optoacoustics is not limited to imaging applications. In GLUMON and RSENSE, RayFos worked on portable optoacoustic sensing systems for non-invasive glucose monitoring and environmental detection of particulates and black carbon. Although based on the same underlying physics, these applications impose very different engineering and signal-processing requirements.
LONG-STANDING COLLABORATION WITH THE MUNICH OPTOACOUSTIC GROUP
Much of the depth and continuity of our optoacoustic work stems from a collaboration that began in 2009 - three years before RayFos was formally established - with the Munich optoacoustics group that developed many of the field’s foundational technologies. Our earliest involvement was through iThera Medical, the spin-out company behind the first commercial MSOT systems. That collaboration has continued through more than fifteen years of EU projects and successive generations of optoacoustic instruments. Today, RSOM technology is commercially available through the Spear Prodigy system from Spear UG, with whom RayFos maintains a close working relationship.
