Our Performance

Back pain is the second largest cause of disease burden in Australia according to the Australian Government. More than 4 million Australians suffer back pain each year and the cost is estimated to be many billions of dollars. Despite this in 90% of cases doctors cannot find any cause or make a diagnosis of where the pain is coming from.

Existing MRI techniques often show changes in the spine but these do not match well with patient symptoms. Using current techniques many people with back pain have normal scans and many people with "abnormal" findings are completely pain free.

This is a frustration our team of scientists, medical doctors and back pain sufferers know well.

In 2018 we began working using computer simulations informed by the best possible understanding of what changes are seen in degenerate discs at a chemical and cellular level to design a better method specifically for diagnosing disc degeneration.

This technique has been tested on animals and outperforms the main techniques currently used in clinical practice and research studies.

Our team believes in transparency and scientific peer-review. We have published our animal results, scanner settings and our algorithm publicly here:   

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jsp2.1060 

Our work has been presented internationally at scientific conferences, and won prestigious Australian and international awards.

Animal and laboratory testing is now complete and research using the technique in humans began in 2019.