A legacy of looking closer

Ernest Rutherford enrols at Canterbury College in Christchurch, graduating MA in 1893. He is awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908, founding a New Zealand tradition of world-class experimental physics.

At CERN, Michael Campbell and colleagues building readout electronics for the Large Hadron Collider realise the same hybrid pixel detectors could image patients and form the informal Medipix1 Collaboration.

The University of Canterbury becomes a member institute of the Medipix3 Collaboration, with Professor Phil Butler leading UC's participation and Professor Anthony Butler joining the Medipix and CMS collaborations at CERN.

Father-and-son professors Phil and Anthony Butler found MARS Bioimaging in Christchurch to commercialise photon-counting technology for medical imaging. Early scans took a day to acquire and a month to reconstruct.

MARS releases the first commercially available multi-energy small-bore spectral CT scanner for preclinical research — still the only one of its kind on the market.

The Medipix3RX-based MARS Microlab platform is developed and refined over the following decade, delivering multi-material, multi-energy 3D data to research groups worldwide.

MARS scans the first living human body with spectral photon-counting CT — CEO Phil Butler's own wrist and ankle.

Human trials begin at the University of Canterbury to assess injured wrists, the first patient is scanned in early 2020, and international clinical trials of the compact point-of-care system follow.

The FDA grants 510(k) clearance (K252249) for the MARS Extremity CT Imaging System, a portable photon-counting CT scanner for upper-extremity imaging in adults — bringing premium musculoskeletal imaging to clinics, sports medicine practices and ambulatory settings.

Reform Radiology in Christchurch, NZ, becomes the first commercial customer and integrates an Extremity CT Imaging System to support local hand and wrist specialists.