Imagine a place where a physician can see patients in the morning, teach a class in the afternoon, go to the lab to check in on their research, then finish their day at their startup’s office—all without ever having to get in the car.
QuSpin Pierces the Neural Veil
John Himes
June 1, 2024
We’re getting a better look at the brain than ever before.
The human mind largely remains a mystery. Both neuroscience itself and the treatment of mental health conditions progress only as our ability to look at the brain—to see a clearer picture—advances.
That’s why QuSpin’s quantum sensing tech is a game changer.
When a person puts on this innovative company’s helmet, incredibly sensitive magnetic field sensors—laser-based magnetometers—take hi-res images in real time.
Whenever neurons fire, they generate a magnetic field; QuSpin’s device senses the tiniest fluctuations in the field and then interprets that data to give researchers and healthcare practitioners a better picture of what’s actually going on in there.
“From the very beginning, we set out to revolutionize neuroimaging,” says Dr. Vishal Shah, the company’s Founder and Chief Scientist.
This technology was invented in Boulder, Colorado, and it is being commercialized in nearby Louisville. QuSpin is one more story about how scientific breakthroughs in our top-tier labs can lead to practical quantum applications that are changing the world. The thriving local quantum tech ecosystem has been instrumental in their success.
By embracing the dual challenges of engineering complex hardware and building a company, Dr. Shah and the rest of the QuSpin team have developed a technology that’s changing how we observe the brain. It has the potential to alter the lives of nearly 60 million Americans and many more around the globe who live with mental illness.
And neuroimaging is only the beginning of what a quantum magnetometer can do!
Here’s how they got here.
(Qu)Spinning out of NIST
It was 2006. Dr. Shah was a grad student at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder, finishing up his PhD research on chip-scale atomic clocks at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
“I was finishing up my thesis when a postdoc, Peter Schwindt, came into my office and said, ‘Look, there’s this magical phenomenon called spin-exchange relaxation free [SERF].’ I said it sounded impossible, but he said, ‘No, it’s real!’” recounts Dr. Shah. “So we took it into the lab and tried to reproduce it. Then it actually worked beyond our wildest dreams.”
They knew they were onto something.
As Dr. Shah graduated, went on to do a postdoc at Princeton (where SERF was discovered), and started working with industry, the thought stayed with him. He had the entrepreneurial bug, so once he had a green card in hand, he went looking for seed money.
Knowing VC funding was unlikely for such a far-fetched idea, he decided to approach the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “I asked them for money and told them that we can revolutionize neuroimaging. They said it sounded like science fiction, but decided to give it a shot.”
Growing to a higher energy level
After founding QuSpin, a small team moved into their first office, built a prototype in six months, and began to grow. They started selling products after four years of government funding Now they’re a profitable and financially stable company.
Eleven years into business, they’ve bootstrapped their way to a team of fourteen talented employees, and they’re getting ready to launch on a global scale.
QuSpin has become the leading name in neuroimaging among top research institutions. Now they’re on a path to get FDA approval and make their technology more accessible by enabling it to function in normal environments, outside of a special magnetically shielded room. The goal is to make it so that hospitals and labs around the world can benefit.
Like with so many innovations, this first application is only the beginning. Dr. Shah plans to expand to other types of quantum sensing like clocks and gyroscopes because he and his team have already done so much of the heavy lifting: doing the research and figuring out how to build devices that are reliable, consistent, and easy to use outside the lab.
They’re also creating magnetometers for other uses like detecting unexploded ordnance and submarines, finding hidden pipes, and enabling archaeological surveys.
It’s always a challenge. But if they didn’t like a good challenge, they definitely wouldn’t have started a quantum tech company.
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Quantum sensing: From picking up magnetic fields to reading minds
To understand where QuSpin’s neuroimaging helmet fits into the picture, let’s take a look at the previous state of the art.
One way to study the brain in real time is with electrodes. The problem is that the readings are low-resolution. “The skull is thick, and the signals don’t propagate well,” explains Dr. Shah.
On the other hand, you can drill into the skull to implant electrodes; understandably, most people aren’t interested in that.
Then there are MRI machines, which are comparable in resolution but only show structural elements of the brain. There’s no information on how the brain operates in real time.
QuSpin’s device uses sensitive magnetic field sensors to pick up and interpret extremely small signals in real time. The results speak for themselves. “Orders keep piling up,” says Dr. Shah. “People want to try it, and we’ve got some phenomenal results. There’s over 60 scientific papers that used our device and said it was groundbreaking.”
Their lightweight helmet isn’t just for scientific research though. It can be used to control devices with thought alone. Dr. Shah continues: “An AI-based decoder can let us know what you’re hearing, seeing, or thinking. If you think about a car, for instance, a car might appear on a screen.”
It’s a cool thought experiment, but it’s also not really the point. “Our vision is to be part of a bigger human endeavor to understand the mind,” concludes Dr. Shah. “Brain disorders are so common. We’re playing a small part in helping solve the larger puzzle of understanding neuroscience, and in the process we’re curing diseases.”
Science and engineering spotlight
This is the part of the article where we get nerdy!
Here’s the basics of how it works. QuSpin’s tech traps a cloud of gaseous rubidium atoms in a glass vapor cell. Those atoms are transparent, but they turn opaque when affected by a magnetic field. The more magnetic signals they receive, the darker the atoms get.
It then shoots a laser into the glass vapor cell. If there’s no magnetic field, all the light passes straight through and gets picked up by a photodetector on the other side. If there is a magnetic field, the laser will bump into opaque atoms in proportion to the field’s strength, and so the amount of photons picked up on the other side will likewise decrease in that same proportion.
This technology is called an Optically Pumped Magnetometer, or OPM. There are two different types, called zero-field and total-field. The main difference is that the total-field OPM works while under the effect of Earth’s magnetic field and measures scalar amplitudes. The zero-field OPM, on the other hand, only works when shielded from Earth’s magnetism, and it measures vector components.
This all may seem quite complicated, but according to Dr. Shah, figuring out the physics was the easy part. They were able to build a functional prototype in six months. It then took five years to build a shippable instrument and another five years to scale up to larger arrays. Why?
“The engineering is the hard part,” explains Dr. Shah. “That means miniaturization, temperature control, running hundreds of sensors in an array, designing compact electronics, and developing complex software like data processing, communications, and a user-friendly interface. Integration and getting the details right is hard.”
Now that they’ve done much of this heavy lifting, they’re poised to grow. They stayed intentionally small while working through over a decade of heavy R&D, but now it’s time to scale up the company so that clinics, hospitals, and labs around the world can advance neuroscience and the diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses.
Colorado is the hub for quantum innovation
Colorado Tech Insider
Dr. Shah saw what was happening on the Front Range during his time at NIST, and it’s this ecosystem that brought him back from the east coast to set up QuSpin in the state.
“The reason we’re in Colorado is because it’s the best place to be for atomic physics and quantum tech. If you’re shooting light at small things, this is where you want to be,” he says.
He points to the large community of local quantum startups, suppliers, and service providers. “Supply chain is easy” because so many of their vendors are local. This is a one-of-a-kind opportunity.
Of course, the company itself spun out of NIST, and they continue to benefit from the research and talent coming out of labs and universities. Finding quantum experts is usually a tall order, but startups like QuSpin are able to take advantage of the fact that many of these experts are right here in Boulder, Denver, and the surrounding area.
It also means startups can support each other. Whether they need to borrow a piece of equipment or bounce some ideas off a friend, startups benefit from Colorado’s human infrastructure that’s propelling the region toward becoming the Silicon Valley of quantum.
“Colorado is the enabler and supporter of this tech,” concludes Dr. Shah. “The ecosystem led to its development, and it enabled us to build local infrastructure. Being in Colorado will enable us to succeed.”
About the Colorado Tech Spotlight
The Colorado Tech Spotlight highlights local innovations and the stories behind them. The series explores how the Colorado tech ecosystem creates an environment that promotes technological progress.
It is produced by Dynamic Tech Media and written by John Himes.
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