Customer Innovation Impact
National Instruments customers are creating innovative solutions that improve quality of life. Whether they are building structural test and monitoring devices that ensure railroad safety, or medical instruments that can detect cancer without the stress of a biopsy, or a solar energy system that keeps milk in rural areas from spoiling, NI customers around the world continue to have a positive impact on the lives of millions of people.
Developing the World’s First Real-Time 3D OCT Medical Imaging System
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a noninvasive imaging technique that provides subsurface, cross-sectional images of materials. Interest in OCT technology continues to grow because it provides much greater resolution than other imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or positron emission tomography (PET). Additionally, the method requires very little preparation and is extremely safe for the patient because it involves low-laser outputs without the use of ionizing radiation.
Kitasato University took advantage of the flexibility and scalability of the NI PXI platform and NI FlexRIO to develop the world’s first real-time 3D OCT imaging system. They used NI LabVIEW to program, integrate, and control the different parts of the system, combining high-channel-count acquisition with field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and GPU processing for real-time computation, rendering, and display.
Solar Energy Helps Keep Milk Safe in Rural India
Every day, dairy processors in India are challenged with transporting milk from millions of individual farms in villages to central processing facilities in distant cities. With the NI graphical system design platform, Promethean Power Systems built a hybrid solar- and grid-powered refrigeration system to cool and store raw milk at the villages where the milk is produced.
The hybrid milk chiller cuts both transportation costs for dairy farmers and chilling costs in half because it uses solar energy. The system works well in rural areas where grid power is unreliable. Most importantly, cooling the milk at the source results in premium-quality, healthier milk that can be used for higher-value products such as cheese and baby formula.
Remotely Assessing the Structural Health of the Long Island Railroad Viaduct
Viewpoint Systems, Inc., needed to remotely monitor the Long Island Railroad (LIRR) viaduct for a long period of time without physically accessing the equipment because the LIRR is the only commuter passenger railroad in the United States that operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Structural test and monitoring are essential to ensure the stability and integrity of civil and commercial structures.
The company collaborated with STRAAM Corporation, a leader in structural integrity assessment, to develop a rugged system that functions outdoors and in other less-accessible sites yet maintains the capabilities of commercially available PC-based solutions. Viewpoint Systems used NI CompactRIO, the LabVIEW FPGA Module, and the LabVIEW Digital Filter Design Toolkit to measure the modal analysis of vibration data generated from ambient excitation, capture this data remotely, and analyze significant