Canon Medical Systems Korea said it held a luncheon symposium on its proprietary ultrasound technologies, SMI Angio and FLI, during the 57th Annual Congress of the Korean Society of Ultrasound in Medicine, or KSUM 2026, at COEX, Seoul on Thursday.
Professor Lee Dong-ho of Seoul National University Hospital presents the technical principles and clinical potential of Canon Medical’s Fluctuation Imaging technology for hepatic hemangioma assessment during a luncheon symposium at KSUM 2026 in Seoul on May 7. (Credit: Canon Medical Systems Korea)
The symposium was chaired by Professor Kim Jung-hoon of the Department of Radiology at Seoul National University Hospital.
Professors Lee Dong-ho of Seoul National University Hospital, Kim Seung-seob of Severance Hospital and Yoon Jong-jin of Severance Yongin Hospital also participated as speakers, sharing recent clinical research findings based on Canon Medical’s ultrasound technologies.
The main topic of the symposium was SMI Angio, a high-precision blood flow analysis function developed from Canon Medical’s Superb Microvascular Imaging (SMI) technology.
SMI is designed to visualize microvascular blood flow, while SMI Angio further improves the analysis of blood flow direction and distribution through a time-axis-based statistical approach.
“Conventional ultrasound has limitations in detecting microvascular structures inside organs because fine blood flow signals can be lost during noise reduction,” the company said. “SMI Angio addresses this issue by statistically analyzing ultrasound images repeatedly acquired over time.”
The technology enables high-sensitivity detection of slower blood flow and clearer separation of adjacent microvessels, allowing high-resolution microvascular imaging without contrast agents, it added.
During the symposium, Professor Yoon presented research evaluating the clinical usefulness of SMI Angio in kidney transplant patients.
Rejection after kidney transplantation is one of the major causes of transplanted kidney injury, but existing imaging methods mainly assess larger vascular structures. Biopsy, while clinically important, is invasive and difficult to repeat frequently, creating a need for noninvasive tools that can assess graft condition more precisely.
Yoon’s research team compared SMI Angio, conventional SMI and color Doppler under the same conditions in 26 kidney transplant patients, including six patients with rejection and 20 patients without rejection.
According to the analysis, SMI Angio showed clear superiority in visualizing microvessels. Compared with color Doppler, SMI Angio showed better microvascular depiction in about 97.7 percent of cases. Compared with conventional SMI, SMI Angio was superior in about 63.3 percent of cases.
The study also found statistically significant differences in microvascular structure-related indicators using SMI Angio. In differentiating rejection, only SMI Angio clearly separated the rejection group from the normal group, while conventional SMI showed only a trend and color Doppler could not distinguish between the two groups.
“SMI Angio presents a new possibility for noninvasively and early detecting kidney transplant rejection by precisely visualizing and quantitatively analyzing microvascular structures compared with conventional ultrasound,” Yoon said. “As it can reflect changes in low-speed blood flow that are difficult to detect with existing methods, it is expected to be used as a diagnostic tool that can complement biopsy.”
The symposium also introduced Fluctuation Imaging (FLI), another proprietary technology under development by Canon Medical. FLI is designed to quantitatively detect and color-map the fluttering sign observed in hepatic hemangiomas.
Hepatic hemangiomas can show subtle internal fluctuations over time because of their heterogeneous internal structure. However, with conventional ultrasound, such findings often have to be judged visually, which can lead to interpretation differences depending on the examiner.
FLI quantifies how much a specific point and its surrounding area change over time and expresses the results in color. Canon Medical explained that the technology also removes noise factors, such as patient breathing or movement, to provide more reliable data.
Lee also explained the technical principles of FLI and its potential clinical applications, saying the technology could improve diagnostic accuracy in a noninvasive way and serve as an auxiliary diagnostic tool for ultrasound examinations.
A Seoul National University Hospital research team published a study on FLI earlier this year. A multicenter clinical study is also underway with Severance Hospital, Chung-Ang University Hospital, Gyeongsang National University Changwon Hospital and Pusan National University Hospital.
Professor Kim shared clinical insights into the diagnostic accuracy and consistency of FLI in detecting hepatic hemangiomas based on his experience in actual clinical practice.
“The KSUM 2026 luncheon symposium showed how Canon Medical’s proprietary technologies, SMI Angio and FLI, can create value in clinical settings,” said, Kim Young-joon, president of Canon Medical Systems Korea. “SMI Angio, in particular, enabled precise microvascular analysis in the kidney transplant field, which was not possible with conventional ultrasound technologies.”
This further strengthened Canon Medical’s technological advantage in microvascular blood flow diagnosis, Kim added.
Lee Han-soo
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